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Chicago Review of Books

Tears of course: Satire and Sorrow in Lars Iyer's My Weil

Ontological evil; the madness of evil or the evil of madness. This is the topic around which Johnny has centered his doctoral degree in Disaster Studies at All Saints University in Manchester, England. Raised in a children’s home, Johnny registers as more psychologically fragile (or maybe just more earnestly human) than the rest of his PhD cohort: Marcie, for instance, the coolly erotic “Den mom” writing on “lumpenproletariat revolt as ultra-politics”; or Gita, whose specialty is queer apocalyptic studies and who, according to Marcie, is “bidding goodbye to heterosexuality by fucking her supervisor.” There is also Valentine, the deicide scholar who wants desperately to be mugged; Ismail, a performance philosopher perpetually “filming the heavens” (and who, as an artist, naturally requires near-constant humbling); and Vortek, who “corresponds with the Unabomber… or says he does,” and everyone agrees “will go on a rampage at some point… A real campus massacre. It’ll probably be part of his PhD—the practical component.”  

Of these and their more minor apocalypse-ogling companions, none seem intent on finishing their dissertations. Instead, each is played—not untenderly, though certainly quite successfully—for laughs as they assume positions of unflagging moral superiority to the omnipresent Business Studies Guy, decry “artwank,” and insist that the “revolution really can’t be televised.”  

This is the group to which incoming student and fervently born-again martyr Simone Weil introduces herself at the outset of Lars Iyer’s sixth and latest novel, My Weil. Tracing Johnny’s keenly observed, kaleidoscopic field of vision, we bear witness as the student deliberately renamed and assiduously modeled after the philosopher-saint navigates her way through the group’s erratic, lore-ridden world, from the city bus besieged by local alcoholics, or “alkies,” to the Ees, a vaguely zoned wooded area used as both a common space and dump by locals.

Surprisingly, despite her “nun shoes” and “ultra-Christian” demeanor, Simone proves adept at fitting in. It is only when she begins to push past the borders of the PhD cohort’s cynical, circumscribed campus world that the trouble begins. Her attempts to undertake missionary work in struggling parts of the city beget multiple off-page assaults and, eventually, a kind of ambiguous end-of-the-world: a societal collapse whose literal parameters are left open to readers’ interpretation.  

The book’s real pleasure lies not so much in any plot or character development but in the sheer incisiveness of its wry, three-pronged critique, aimed at pseudo-intellectual, nihilist, and Do-Gooder frameworks alike. There is an impressive amount of humor here, heaped up in Iyers’ short, periodic sentences. Indeed, some chapters or subsections contain no notable narrative event at all; they simply describe another farce-worthy facet of the overbloated institution and its puffed-up inhabitants, proceeding in prose stilted and italicized to the point of absurdity.

My Weil’s mockery is so scathing that it verges, at times, on numbing. Thankfully, not everything is despoiled. There are genuine exchanges between Johnny and Simone which—though Iyers is careful to handle them lightly—begin to assemble a comprehensive ethic of care:  

Similarly, the group’s diatribes on academia slip occasionally into elegy, as they describe “revisit[ing] scholarly disputes no one recalls. Affairs of dust. Abstruse debates, figures, names.” They explain how “we’ve wanted to scuba dive around the great wrecks of thought. Among great drowned beasts. Through arching thought-skeletons, picked clean by fishes.” As a result, they have “tasted paradise, Business Studies Guy, and know everything else is bitter,” so that if they “seem to hate everything, it’s only because [they’ve] loved so many things.”  

Lines like these perforate already permeable borders between satire and sorrow. In their plaintive defense, they call into question the fundamental value of human toil, thought, and knowledge, exposing an existential doubt which extends well beyond the bounds of institutional academia. At the same time, the book represents a subtler response to aggregate loss and absurdity than its surface cynicism might suggest—intimating, ultimately, that the sum of many disasters might be something akin to meaning.

ELLIE EBERLEE

My Weil, Foreword Reviews

In Lars Iyer’s comedic novel My Weil, a ragtag cohort of doctoral candidates studies at a Manchester university’s second-rate philosophy program—rebranded Disaster Studies. The members of this grimy and vibrant group spend a lot of their time together, pondering the politics of the apocalypse. They quote philosophers, bicker, and compete over hookup partners too. Still, they are their own family by choice, sharing esoteric knowledge, nicknames, and hangouts.

As a unit, the students bus and wander from the university to their regular café and their regular bar. Satire rules in the wild park space, the Ees, where they’re creating a theory-heavy student film. Their discourses are funny, even as their surroundings become psychedelic and unmoored from England’s decaying rust belt. Their intoxication and boisterousness contrast with their austere new friend, who has taken the very name of thinker Simone Weil as her own.

The book also revels in Manchester’s rich musical history. Joy Division’s doomed Ian Curtis, frozen forever in the big emotions of young adulthood, sets a lovelorn tone for the story that mirrors that of its central narrator, Johnny. Johnny’s voice often disappears into the collective one, but he’s the one member of the group looking outward. His friends are all thinking about themselves or their art—except for fascinating Simone, who seems determined to erase herself in the name of religious servitude.

Party scenes send them all out of their comfort zones; the book’s quick summaries of the other students lead to
hilarity. The descriptions of the goth philosophical duo, Weep (allies to Johnny and friends) are delightful whenever they make an appearance, including in departmental badminton games.

A perfect comic novel, My Weil shares the intense, urgent feelings of close young friends who are out to save the world, whether it notices them or not.

MEREDITH GRAHL COUNTS (September / October 2023)

LM: Warner Brothers had contacted Bob Schwaid [Morrison's manager at the time], and he contacted me. And they had sent some producers, and they didn't know what he was talking about; people went up expecting to hear "Brown Eyed Girl," because the year before he had had "Brown Eyed Girl" on Bang Records and that's what he was last known for. So Joe Smith and Mo Ostin asked me to go up [to Boston] and listen to him. And I went up and it was at Ace Recording Studio at 1 Boylston Place, and there was Van Morrison, very timidly sitting on a stool and I came in very timidly sitting on a stool and he played! And the first tune he played was "Astral Weeks." Thirty seconds into it, my whole being was vibrating, because having spent all that time with jazz players, when he was playing, I could hear—the lyric I got right away; I knew he was being reborn. I heard 30 seconds, a minute and it went right through me, and I got the poetry of it. It was just stunning, and I knew I wanted to work with him at that moment. He went on and played more things, various tunes. And I guess everything was agreed on and he came back to New York, with Bob, who was going to manage him, who was picked to manage him and the other producers didn't hear it the way I heard it.

My first thought was when I heard him I heard Richard Davis, because I used to use Richard in a lot of sessions. Van and I rehearsed—Warners had a publisher's little recording studio up at Warner Brothers; they still have it. It's a little place for songwriters to work, producers to work with artists. And we worked for a couple weeks, and he had, I think, been working in Boston and doing a lot of the material, so he knew his material well. I culled through it and chose what tunes I thought—in my mind I'm very conceptual, and I never asked him to discuss the meaning of any of his tunes. He's that kind of a person. We'd sit and have dinner together—you know, like what we're doing now—and we'd talk a lot. He had no idea what was going on. He basically didn't have a clue.

I got Larry Fallon, who I worked with also; he's in heaven now working with other great musicians. He's a jazz player, and he came in and wrote out chord sheets and got Richard involved. I said, "Richard, it's got to really lay underneath him; you can't go and do notes with him because he's just going to sit and play his guitar and you've got to fill it." We decided to get Connie Kay and Jay [Berliner] too and the other people we contacted, which I had worked with some of them before. And I said, "Van, we're going in the studio." And Van does a lot of, "Uh, uh, uh, uh" [mimicking Morrison's monosyllabic, unexpressive speech]—he's got this personality; I don't want to overdescribe it or underdescribe it. I think he's a remarkable poet and all credit to him. As I said to someone else, something that's as timeless as this had to happen: It had to happen that it was me and not Tom Wilson that was sent up there. It had to happen that I heard the lyrics and knew what to do in my mind—or felt I knew what to do. I just—not to sound too metaphysical about it, but there was no way of avoiding that. I believe that's true of anything that's timeless.

Working with jazz musicians, some of them are so timeless. I was at Carnegie Hall two weeks ago to hear Keith Jarrett, the 25th anniversary with his trio; that's beyond timeless. Anyway, we came down, and we went to Brooks Arthur's studio and Van, again, didn't really know what was happening. Larry had worked with him a little in the rehearsal studio, just went over the chords to make sure everything was right and went in the studio. Van had never worked with—I don't believe he had heard of the players we had, and it happened rather spontaneously. I knew what I wanted to do, Van got in a sort of an open booth, just a half-moon booth, with a mike, his guitar, vocal. Richard sat down and ran [a tune], and we did it.

And for me, it was Richard all the way; Richard was the soul of the album. Richard was the heart and beat of it, which I knew he would be because, it was funny: Whenever I used Richard on sessions, you know sometimes you call sessions, musicians play, personalities come out. Whenever I had an important session, I'd call Richard. Richard was always there twenty minutes, half an hour early practicing. And when the other musicians would come in and see Richard, they knew they had to come up to top form.

A lot of respect—it was just beautiful, just beautiful. I forget if we did one take, two takes, how many times I may have interrupted it and asked the band to soften it up a little bit and maybe move the tempo a little bit. Van had nothing to say. He just went and sang the song. That's primarily the way the album preceded.

HS: I know there was a quote online—

LM: Stories. There's been so many stories.

HS: It really seems like there has been. Some people said that it wasn't recorded simultaneously. You're telling me the entire thing was live?

LM: Every cut on that album was done with Van and the basic group, live. What was overdubbed was the strings and the horns. That's it. Flute—there's a flute thing, but I don’t even know if that was overdubbed. I know John Payne wanted to do it, the kid from Boston, and then I said no; I got somebody else, and then I finally said, "Do the thing already." And he was thrilled he did it. It was absolutely—in fact it was so live, I'll give you something inside. I was talking to Richard last night; he teaches bass up in Madison ,Wisconsin. Have you interviewed him?

HS: I'm going to the show and I'm going to speak to him afterwards. [This never happened, since Davis didn't end up performing.]

LM: They [i.e., Morrison's camp] sent him—don't tell him I said this. After the shows it's okay. But they had someone in L.A. write every single note, every breath, every curve, every subtlety that he did, they had written out for him. So he comes out there the next week; they're trying to imitate the exactness of the album. They're not gonna: Connie Kay is in heaven, and the only other person alive was Jay Berliner, which they did the same thing to. This was a spontaneous thing: Richard, all those feelings that you hear on the album that Richard gave the bass line that laid so beautifully there, that you feel, that laid such a nice place for those lyrics to go on; Richard just did that! You know, jazz musicians are— I have a special love for them. You know back when I started, rarely were there charts when they did albums. People came in and did albums, jazz musicians, Lee Morgan and great players, they just knew when it was their turn and they knew what to play. You know, there were plenty of albums that had written-out charts, because Bobby Timmons—I'm talking about jazz musicians that were really fine musicians, and Art [Blakey] had written-out charts. A lot of people had charts, but many dates were done, dates where the pianist started and everyone went with him and the next guy played played his solo and the next guy played with him and so forth and so on. This was that kind of an atmosphere that I created for us.

The funniest thing was that Warner Brothers, when they first heard it, didn't know what to make of it. They said, "This is not 'Brown Eyed Girl.' I said, "I don't know how make 'Brown Eyed Girl.' I said, "You go ahead and you take 'Astral Weeks' and you make that into 'Brown Eyed Girl.' Don't you get what he…?" People didn't get it right way. I think Joe loved it—he was the president of Warner Brothers—and I think somebody else loved it, but they didn't know how to market it; it laid around for a year. I mean, I truly loved the album; I loved it, my heart loved it,
I listened to it daily. Not so with most albums I produce, to that degree. Bob couldn't book the band because they wanted "Brown Eyed Girl," and he wasn't "Brown Eyed Girl" anymore. And people didn't know what he was doing. He had his own band—John [Payne] was with him, people from Boston. I think he worked the scene; Bob got him maybe the Bitter End. People didn't get what was happening; that's not what they expected. Rolling Stone, I think it was Ben Fong-Torres, called it the album of the year in 1968, and that's how it happened. He heard it, and heard it; he heard it. It's not an album that you put on and—some people hear it right away, and some people have to hear it a couple times. People used to ask me, "What is he talking about? Who's Madame George?" I said, "Ask him, why are you asking me who Madame George is?" It's beautiful, it's music—let it be whoever you want it to be. He was going with Janet Planet at the time—he may have been married to her or not—"Ballerina," certain tunes. Even the album cover—Warner Brothers' designer listened to the album and he gave it a mystical feel; that was the nature of the album, which can't be explained, like any mystery you can't really explain it. There were more tunes recorded that weren't on the album; that was my choice. I labeled [the sides] "In the Beginning" and "Afterwards." I think Van was a little pissed at me for doing that. I said it felt like a beginning and afterwards when I sequenced the album. The last tune, "Slim Slow Slider," I needed for time on the album. It sort of had the mood of "We're over," something was over. And what was over was actually those tunes in my mind. And working together we already worked a lot of the tunes for Moondance. They just didn't fit: In my mind they didn't work with Astral Weeks, which was really a rebirth kind of mystery. So I think those other tunes were bootlegged. I think Clinton had showed me a copy of four tunes I didn't use; they were meaningless, I never had a copy; I didn't care, they didn't mean much to me.

The album had its normal trials and tribulations. I must have stopped, the engineer must have stopped the album, you know, the album. As a tune is down, you may want to do a piece over. The strings were done at Mastertone Recording Studio on 42nd street. I engineered them. I knew the owner, so I was at the studio one night— engineered them, Larry wrote the strings, Van had comments about them, I had comments about them: where to put them, which tunes to use them on. I don't know how many people know that there's a cascading string line that goes down the left side of the speaker and up the right side of the speaker on "Astral Weeks" at the ending; listen, you'll hear the string line go down. Just little things, you know, touches of more—It was all done; it could have been Van, nothing. We didn't need horns, we didn't strings; it was done, the magic was done. There were just little compliments that were put on. Horns [i.e., on "The Way That Young Lovers Do"] I wasn't thrilled about, but that's what we had in the arrangement. I thought it might have been less harsh, but it seemed to work.

[…] HS: In the Heylin book, it said something about how you had King Pleasure in mind when you were conceiving Astral Weeks.

LM: Oh yeah, we both, he and I would sit and talk. James Moody, King Pleasure [hums "Moody's Mood for Love"]. We both loved that. Van, he loved blues. He had real deep roots in blues. When we talked, I don't know what I said in the book—["Moody's Mood for Love"] was one of the musical pieces that was stunning in its description of a feeling.

HS: I think it's interesting that on Astral Weeks, I think there are elements of the record, like "The Way That Young Lovers Do," it's a very jazzy feel in a traditional way. And I think there's another sense though on something like "Beside You," it almost has more in common with the free-form jazz that was happening in the early 60s, more than it does with [records that have] an old-school singer with a jazz orchestra behind them. When you first heard those pieces did you have the more free-form jazz in mind?

LM: The only one I really had in mind was "Astral Weeks," that I really heard. I started hearing them as we were going. I think what Larry did with the horns [on "The Way That Young Lovers Do"] it was the one I wasn't really overjoyed with, as far as the harshness of the arrangements. It was very hard against everything else which was not so hard. It was really definitive, the way it pushed. It caused that tune to sound that way with the horns more than anything else.

HS: Had you heard any of Richard Davis's more avant-garde jazz?

LM: I knew all of it. And the players that I used with him in a lot of the sessions were jazz players. I did a Biff Rose album; I don't know if you remember him, he was a star for a moment. Stunning lyrics, great piano player. In fact, they did a two-sided album, comedy and tragedy because he was bi-musical: "I guess I forgot to tell you how much I love you,"—Oh, it just tore your heart out. I said to Richard, "Bring in who you want," or I had some people; there would be a lot of jazz players. They wouldn't play in the pure jazz form but their sensitivity was that of a jazz player. The nuances were much different than just a regular studio musician, who had a balance. I mean Jay Berliner is a great classical guitarist. You don't see albums with Jay Berliner on it. He's classically styled, it's something different. I'm giving you long answers to some simple questions.

HS: The thing that interests me most about the record is on pieces like "The Way That Young Lovers Do" some of the tunes have more of a repeating form. But like "Beside You," it's almost like the bass is improvising along as the vocal line for the tune.

LM: Probably so.

HS: And it's very free-form and it's unlike any other pop music in the way that it's presented.

LM: Well that's the form that Van presented it. Because Richard was underneath; he didn't create it. Van had to sing it that way, he had to present it that way, and Richard took the liberty of doing what he did underneath it. And the tunes that I liked, most of them had some, I guess it was a mystical romantic feeling to it after being born again. I mean that's the tunes I selected for the album. We didn't always agree.

HS: When you first heard Van Morrison playing the song, and you had this idea of maybe using Richard Davis, did you discuss that with [Morrison]?

LM: I may have, but I don't think—in fact I'm sure he didn't know who Richard Davis was. He hadn't worked in that world with pure jazz players. After this was all over, he tried to use Larry Fallon; it didn't work out. He tried to use Richard Davis; I think he flew Richard to London, but Richard never got a copy of the album, so it didn't work out. In fact Van is trying to do—There's an old saying that you can only step in the river one time. Well, Van is trying to something that can't be done [i.e., reproduce Astral Weeks]. He's not innocent; he was innocent one time, he can't be innocent twice, I mean, as far as I know. I mean you can be a born-again something or other, and change your way of life, go from one type of a life to another type, have a more orthodox life. I'm not saying humans can't change. But when he did Astral Weeks, he didn't even know it, he had been born again. There was a poet that was loose there. It poured out. Think of it. Astral Weeks and Moondance and never again. Tons of albums, nothing equal to those albums. He is a marvelous poet, and he's written some incredible tunes, the tune Rod Stewart did; he's a marvelously gifted poet and artist. But when I went into Ace Studio, there was a little baby sitting there—he was timid. And I hate to say timid. I don't know what he was during "Brown Eyed Girl," but when I met him, I felt like I had met some purely innocent person that was saying these words, and felt it, and didn't really fully get what he was saying. Get the poetry, the poetic—I don't want to just use a bunch of words: He got it, but as a writer he was speaking from his unconscious almost

HS: Along those lines, in terms of stepping in the river twice, how do you feel about the idea that they're trying to re-create it?

LM: I have mixed feelings about it. Van, it's 40 years and the original is on Warner Brothers and maybe he wants to have an opportunity to put it out on his own label now and resell it. Van has never worked for anybody for a long time. Van is a very "I" person: "I wrote it, I produced, I sang on it." He's a very "I" person. And this being the album that is his, quote, creative gift. Rolling Stone put out a tabletop book, I don't know if you saw it or not, with the 500 greatest albums. And the people that picked were everyone from Bono to top disk jockeys and things like that. And this album was voted number 19—19 out of the top 500 albums. I brought a copy of it to show you. If he wanted to just do it, he wouldn't get Richard. Richard is laughing, like, "I don't know if I'll be able to do exactly what I did 40 years ago!" It's pretty hard to play nuances. So I don't know what his motive is.

HS: You don't communicate with Van much anymore?

LM: No, we had unfortunately—during Moondance, when we started working on it, he got a new manager, a woman up in Woodstock, and she wanted to break him out of every agreement. He didn't want to work with Bob anymore, simply because Bob didn't do anything with Astral Weeks and this woman manager, I forget her name, [wanted to get him] out of everything, even though we had pretty much selected the tunes for Moondance, we had rehearsed Moondance. We were having a debate whether he uses some of the players he found at Woodstock or Richard again and some of that again, but that would have been resolved without litigation. So we were moving ahead and litigation stopped how much I could participate. If anything, I could've called myself co-producer of the album, of Moondance, certainly a lot of work was done by Van and the group at Woodstock. My work would've been with total honesty, I would've wanted to get coproduction, which I could've had, they gave me the choice. At the time I was so upset with the whole thing, I think that's the title I gave myself, the title I chose. Because there was going to be a litigation. Bob, without going into it, it was a—What we owned and Warner Brothers and Van owned, was three-way split on things.

HS: Moondance is obviously much more straightforward than Astral Week.
LM: Van was writing that. "Moondance" has a melody; he came in with a light-jazz melody happening to it. Forgive me for interrupting your question.

HS: When you were thinking of bringing Richard and
the other musicians back, were you thinking of making Moondance a similar thing to Astral Weeks?

LM: No, no, no, only Richard, not the rest of the muscians. This was a different thing; this was a poppish type of thing.

HS: So you had no intention of sort of re-doing that?

LM: I, as a producer, if I got anything out of working with an engineer, [it was that] I worked with good producers. I attempt to frame the artist within the best way, not to make X,Y, not to turn it sideways. They're the artist. I'm the artist in my way of what I do. But no, I knew it was pop right away. I could've put "Moondance" on Astral Weeks, but it didn't fit. It was a pop tune. There's nothing pop on Astral Weeks, I don't care how you cut it. You can try to do, and I think some of the tunes may have done; Johnny Rivers covered a tune from Moondance the second it was released and had a hit with it. But lyrically, it was marvelous; it was a marvelous album.

HS: Back to the Astral Weeks sessions: You said there were chord sheets given to Richard Davis?

LM: Larry wrote just chords that the bands played,

HS: So you wrote them out?

LM: Yeah, just the chords. They were there for interpretation.
HS: Richard was sort of the leader of the thing, right?
LM: No, he was over there, the drummer that was there. Van was the leader, Van played.

HS: But [Morrison] never discussed what he wanted to do? He would just start playing and they would start playing?

LM: Larry would run the tune down once or twice.

HS: And so the other musicians would play without the vocal?

LM: No, with the vocal, they'd get a feel of where it was going. How it was going.

HS: But the arrangements—

LM: There were no arrangements.

HS: It was pretty much spontaneous.

LM: It was totally, the whole album was done, other than the strings and the horns was done free-from, spontaneous, not free-form, but spontaneous based on what Van was doing. If you listen very carefully you'll hear in most tunes, it's Van and Richard happening and drums everything moving it along.

HS: I heard there was an edit on "Slim Slow Slider," that there was a long instrumental section at the end.

LM: No [Laughs]. I faded it out; there may have been an edit, who knows. Whatever I took out, if there was something taken out, it was because it didn't have any relativity in my mind to what was done. "Slim Slow Slider" was just—of the tunes that were, I think four other tunes may have been cut that we were thinking about. Because in my mind we needed more time for the album and of them "Slim Slow Slider" had the best ending effect. Sort of sad, melancholy type ending. I don't remember honestly whether there was something cut out or not.

HS: There's someone in the book quoted as saying there was a long instrumental section, that was played, that didn't appear on the actual album.

LM: That's possible

HS: Those tapes don't still exist?

LM: Not that I know of.

HS: There was also some indication in the book that Van Morrison that album didn't end up the way he wanted it to end up.

LM: Totally regardless of what Van said, Van had no idea how he wanted to album to start or end.

HS: Do you remember talking to him afterwards about whether or not he was satisfied or after the sessions or anything like that?

LM: We were on to Moondance. I don't know, we just gave the album to Warner Brothers. I don't remember him having any comments.

HS: Did he comment on the sensitivity of the players that you had chosen?

LM: Van—did you ever see Van work in person?

HS: No.

LM: Well Van will stand there holding the microphone. He's almost frozen on stage most of the time; he's not a performer. Van doesn't give much respect to his audience, much less anyone else around him.

HS: Because Richard Davis said there was absolutely no contact between Van and the musicians.

LM: None! Zero. When I say zero, I mean they didn't hang out. Take was over, there was a break, Richard and the guys went out to smoke a cigarette, grabbed a cup of coffee. They weren't Van's band.

HS: Were you self-conscious about that, bringing those parties together? It was just sort of a professional situation?

LM: That's what had to be done. What was I going to do? Go out and find musicians who would fall in love with Van and start a band and do that? Might as well of taken five years. I took an artist and produced an album.

HS: So there was no direction you sensed coming from him, so you took control and did it your way.

LM: The direction was him singing and playing—that was where I followed. That's why it came out the way it did. If I would've gone somewhere else, it wouldn't have came out the way it did. So there obviously was a direction from somewhere in the sky.

HS: I didn't mean to say that it was haphazard…

LM: No, no, no, I'm very serious with you. Just think, when I sat down, I said to you that something as timeless as forty years had to happen because it had to happen. I had to be the one to do it. Not that producer, not that producer, not that producer, regardless of their accomplishments. It had to be Richard, not that bass player. I don't want to sound to existential, but there was Van, and that was it; there was no band. We didn't talk about going out and finding a band that was gonna play "Madame George." That was a tune that he had when he was on Bang Records. Nobody knew what to do with "Madame George." That wasn't a new tune he wrote for the album.

HS: Obviously the album has gotten a huge amount of accolades, but when you cut it, did you have a sense of the unprecedentedness of it?

LM: I just knew it was beautiful and I felt good. I felt real good. Having been a recording engineer working with people, I can pick out, I wish this was mixed a little different—you know, I stood behind Brooks and tried to balance it properly. If you write you might wish you would've changed a sentence. I was totally in love with it—I loved it, it was beautiful. It was stunning and it still is to this day. To this day it still gives me pain to hear it. Pain is the wrong word—I'm so moved by it. It is what it is.

HS: So would you even want to hear what was done live with it? Do you have any interest in it?

LM: Curiosity. But I mean it's going to be what it's going to be, unless he adds other tunes. I mean, what's he going to do? Sing Astral Weeks in another language? He gave Richard [the bass notation]—In fact, he's doing a cover record, on himself. It's a timeless piece.

I'm your age and I did an album. This was given to me [referring to Rolling Stone book on 500 greatest albums]: Exile on Main Street, the Clash, Bob Dylan—he's got three albums in the top 20—The White Album, here look at it, The Velvet Underground, which my Buddy Tom did, Abbey Road, Are You Experienced? Look at the albums, legendary albums: Nevermind, Born to Run, Astral Weeks. You know what it felt like when someone gave me this? You know how it feels to feel like a little kid and go, "Oh my god, me?" You know what I feel? I have no idea who wrote this: Look at this review, read the last paragraph and tell me what you feel like, you be me for a second. Look at the last paragraph and then tell me what you feel like.

HS: Wow.

LM: That wow went right through me. "The crowning achievement of the album was choosing the—" [a reference to Merenstein's decision to use seasoned jazz players as sidemen]. That's exactly what happened, those people added the color and the mist. Look wh
at the artist did to the album, listening to the album; he made the cover, no one told him to make it like that. It was all there, it couldn't not be exactly that.

HS: That's great how they credited you like that.

LM: Think of yourself as a writer, if someone said the crowning achievement, the 19 greatest pieces of writing out of 500. I see the albums that came after it and the people that chose, from Bono, to 50 top disk jockeys. How did it end up being number 19? That's why [Morrison] wants to do [Astral Weeks] again.

[…] Any album that 40 years later people are still playing and talking about and they're willing to write about and find out deeper secrets about it. But there are no secrets about it other than he played it, I heard it and knew where to go. And that's because I had my sensitivity and my emotions, my professionalism. And he had his sensitivities, poetry, artistry, rebirth, or unconscious way of speaking poetry that he might not have had before. It certainly wasn't obvious before. So as time goes by, I keep telling the George Martin story to people who speak loudly about themselves, in a way, only because I see that's truly the way it is. In Hebrew, they might say it's bashert—it was meant to happen. Every language has its own "It's supposed to happen" kind of thing. I'm lucky! 

Lewis Merenstein, producer of Astral Weeks, interviewed.

Interviews with the great Richard Davis, who died this month (Sep 2023.)

On Charles Gayle.

An imaginary comprises those shared meanings, symbols, values, narrative and representations of the world that we hold at a subconscious level. It’s usually inarticulate and unstructured, being expressed in images and stories rather than in theoretical terms. But it is our imaginary that allows us to make sense of the world in which we live and our place within it, providing an imaginative, narrative context that, in Alison McQueen’s word, emplots our shared lives, allowing otherwise incomprehensive events to make sense as part of a larger story.

My theme is the Gnostic imaginary, where I understand Gnosticism in the terms set forth by twentieth-century philosopher of religion Jacob Taubes (1923-87), as an inward relation to transcendence. Gnosticism, Taubes argues, originates in the early centuries of our common era as the result of thwarted apocalyptic and messianic impulses. We might understand the Gnostic imaginary (my term, not his) as channelled through human history, both religious and secular. My argument is that we can find Gnostic strategies of inversion in modern literary writing and literary criticism, as they help reckon with a world where meaning is no longer given. As we will see, the work of Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) is exemplary here – a near contemporary of Taubes, who also grew up in Austria, and who likewise wrote in the wake of the Second World War.

*

In order to understand the Gnostic imaginary, we have to understand the apocalyptic one. And in order to understand that, we will have to take ourselves all the way back to the political crises of ancient Palestine.

There was trouble back then. Conquest, foreign rule and pressures of assimilation, as well as exile and deportation, were not supposed to befall the Israelites, God’s chosen people. They had, after all, entered into a covenant with God, which guaranteed God’s protection so long as they obeyed his law.

The prophets claimed that the sufferings of Israel were evidence of disobedience and would cease once the Israelites returned to God. But this message, the opening of the prophetic imaginary, was no comfort for those Israelites who struggled most assiduously against cultural assimilation: for they had it worst of all.

How could God let this happen, if he was in ultimate control of the world? The prophetic imaginary gave way to the apocalyptic one in response to this question. The age of prophets came to an end in the excesses of persecution, when a new kind of writer and text appeared, using a rich, dense symbolism. The apocalyptic imaginary can be seen at work in the Biblical books of Daniel and Revelations, which are full of cataclysmic imagery of an ambiguous kind, including natural disasters, ravenous beasts, plague and fire. But they are also full of wild messianic hope. That hope lies in apocalypse.

*

Etymologically, and as it is used in the Judeo-Christian tradition, apocalypse means an unveiling or revelation – a kind of vision. Cataclysm may well be imminent, but it opens onto a radical future, in which the evil forces of the present will be vanquished. There is promise in the end of the world.

The apocalyptic visions recounted in the books of Daniel or Revelations dramatize God’s temporary abandonment of control of the forces of evil as well as the promise of his return to reassert his dominion. The persecuted can look forward to their coming vindication, to the divine redemption that will bring an end to suffering and death.

The apocalyptic imaginary thus makes sense of the torments of the present. Suffering has an explanation; it happens for a reason. In the approaching end times, havoc will be wreaked upon the persecutors and the Messiah will triumph over politics, history, over all human institutions and practices – the entire worldly order. The dualism between God and the world will be resolved once and for all when the kingdom of God opens.

But what happens when the putative Messiah arrives and fails? What, when Jesus the Christ is nailed to the cross, leaving the worldly order apparently unaltered?

Taubes argues that Jewish messianic logic plays out through an inward turn: the opening of introspective conscience, of the domain of faith. The letters of Paul of Tarsus see the spiritual fulfilment which was supposed to follow from the apocalyptic ending of the present age is interiorised, taking place in the human soul. For Taubes, this inward messianic realm of freedom, of faith, suspends not only the Mosaic law, which is to say, the legal framework of the Roman Empire but also the Hellenistic metaphysics of law, that is, general sense of worldly order and structure. Paul rejects all earthly, lawful, orderly authority in the name of faith.

For Nietzsche, this is a despicable move. The apostle is a nihilist! The Pauline revolution – Pauline antinomianism – expresses ‘a revolt of all creatures that creep on the ground against everything that is lofty’. Paul nihilistically devalues the noble and the beautiful; more: he repudiates their very source. For Nietzsche, Paul and his followers hate this world because they fear it, placing their faith instead in a world beyond.

What is striking in Taubes’s analysis is that he embraces Nietzsche’s charge against Paul. Yes, the apostle is a nihilist. Who wouldn’t be when the Roman empire, with all its might and glory, crucified your Messiah? To take the love of the neighbour as your guiding principle, to turn to celebrate those persons regarded as outcasts, as refuse, was as far as possible from the imperial cult of the Roman world.

So how are these nihilists, the Pauline believers, to live? In what Nietzsche calls ‘holy anarchism’. But how are we to understand that?

We might find Paul’s answer in his notion of ‘as though not’ (hōs mē), in he calls for an adjustment to our investment in worldly relations and actions:

The appointed time has grown short. From now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away. I want you to be free from anxieties. (1 Corinthians 7:29, my emphasis)

As Paul notes, the world decays; the form of the world is passing. The Messiah was nailed to the cross, but he rose, and he will return.

So how then are the addressees of Paul’s letter to endure the corrupt and fallen world? Not by rising up against it, because it’s going to collapse anyway. In Taubes’s words, ‘There’s no point in raising a finger […] Sure it’s evil, but— what are you going to do?’ The messianic community has to stay alert! be vigilant! – to watch for the revelation of signs of the coming of the Kingdom. But it has to stay quiet for now.

*

Taubes brings Paul very close to what he calls called Gnosticism. Some have argued that never really was a body of work that could be called Gnostic, this category being a phantasmic retro-projection of twentieth-century thinkers. An assessment of this claim is too outside my scope. I will follow Hans Jonas’s vastly influential Heideggerian reconstruction of Gnosticism, where the clear parallel between the Gnostic imagination and its prophetic forebear is evident: the strong sense of the dualism of human and divine realms. Crucially, the Gnostics reject the apocalyptic idea that this dualism can be resolved. Human history is not, for them, about to come to an end, which is the problem. It all goes on forever.

This means we are condemned to inhabit this world as strangers, in perpetual alienation. The true god is elsewhere – desperately remote. The cosmos – the world we see around us – is the work of the demiurge, a wicked deceiver god.

The Gnostic task is remember that this world is not our home, communing with the true God, who we can know only in his absence. The gnosis, knowledge – from which Gnosticism gets its name – is given in the relation to the true god, which helps the Gnostic to live against the grain of the fallen domain.

*

The parallels between the apostle Paul and the Gnostics become clear in Taubes’s reading of his Letters.

For Paul, like the Gnostics, the cosmos is ruled by demonic powers; Satan is the prince of this world. For Paul, like the Gnostics, the aim is to achieve a kind of gnosis, or knowledge, that allows you to hold yourself back from full participation in the world, which remains ruled by the wicked ‘powers and principalities’. For Paul, like the Gnostics, very little can be said about God. As Taubes writes:

The negative statements about God—unrecognizable, unnameable, unrepeatable, incomprehensible, without form, without bounds, and even nonexistent—all orchestrate the . . . Gnostic proposition that God is essentially contrary to the world.

This suggests that what Paul calls faith is a relation to an empty transcendence, lacking determinate content and contesting at every turn the works that support the order of the world. God is what Hans Jonas called the ‘nothing of the world’, understood as the antithesis of worldly power.

*

If Jonas is one important source for Taubes’s notion of Gnosticism, Gershom Scholem is another.

As Willem Styfhals shows, a scholar to whom I am indebted here (this essay is really just notes in his margins), Scholem regards the event we know as the ‘death of God’ –the rise of secularism, generalised disenchantment, etc. – does not mean the end of messianism. Indeed, the true content of religious messianism reveals itself only as religious traditions lose their authority in secular modernity. For Scholem, the disenchanted world is alive with religious energies, even they are usually in disguised form, unavowed and displaced. As such, the death of God, disenchantment, secularism, even modernity itself as a religious phenomenon – a moment in the history of religion.

A startling claim, since Modernity is supposed to reveal religious claims and systems of authority as human-all-too-human fictions that lack divine legitimation. Religion is supposed to wither away. For Scholem, this very must be understood as a religious gesture: the very groundlessness and contentlessness of the messianic call makes it superlatively religious.

Modernity, on this account, might be understood as the fulfilment of messianic thinking. The relation to the divine can now be revealed as an empty transcendence. By the same stroke, a whole theological vocabulary put itself out of use, ready for new appropriations outside traditional religious practice.

*

One such appropriation occurs in literary criticism. Reading Styfhals’s study of Gnosticism in postwar German thought, critic Stephen Mitchelmore, who publishes his work at his blog, This Space, notes with surprise how words like apocalypse, messianism, transcendence and eternity, which he thought meant little to him, have come to bear a ‘charge of significance’. Literature, Mitchelmore argues, ‘marks the place where religious thinking recurs in a culture where it has otherwise withdrawn, in this case as anachronistic, and yet cannot be repressed’.

Mitchelmore reminds us how Scholem finds the ‘nothingness of revelation’ [das Nichts der Offenbarung] that is also the ‘revelation of nothingness’ in the work of Kafka, and how Jacob Taubes makes similar arguments with respect to the Surrealists.

(We might also include Blanchot’s ‘primal scene’ in these terms – that fragment of The Writing of the Disaster where a young child looks up to the ordinary sky and sees:

the sky, the same sky, suddenly open, absolutely black and absolutely empty, revealing (as though the pane had broken) such an absence that all has since always and forevermore been lost therein – so lost that therein is affirmed and dissolved the vertiginous knowledge that nothing is what there is, and first of all nothing beyond.

Might Blanchot’s ’nothing beyond’ be read in a similar way: not as an atheistic rejection of transcendence, but as a vertiginous gnosis of the beyond as nothingness? Can his literary practice an engagement with ‘empty transcendence’? I’ll leave this question open.)

There is one author of particular importance to Mitchelmore: Thomas Bernhard. I will extend Mitchelmore’s reading here.

*

The fiction for which Bernhard is known consists of wildly hyperbolic, virtuosic rants by Geistesmenschen, intellectual men, engaged in obsessive artistic, philosophical or musical projects. Typically written in a single unending paragraph in musical, fugue-like prose, his novels lack description or direct speech, his narrators frequently taking up and performing grammatical variations on notable words or phrases. It all takes place, as the critic Michael Hofmann notes, ‘at a pitch where you don’t know if it’s wildness or control or somehow both’.

The fulminations of Bernhard’s narrators are full of inconsistency and resentment, revelling in varieties of often self-inflicted despair. They rail against post-war Austrian narrow-mindedness and ignorance. For this reason, Bernhard is often read rather quickly as a satirist, a scourge of Austrian life.

Hofmann, writing in the London Review of Books praises Bernhard’s novels as ‘sculptures of opinion, rather than contraptions assembled from character interactions’; each book ‘is a curved, seamless rant’. Hofmann fantasises that Bernhard could have added running heads on the pages of his work for the subject of each of his rants, e.g. ‘‘children’s education’, ‘the Catholic Church’, ‘the Austrian state’, ‘Heidegger’, ‘Mahler’, ‘sentimental regard for the working classes’’, etc.

But in a letter to the London Review of Books, writer David Auerbach objects that Hofmann misses out on what is significant about Bernhard’s novels, merely confirming the stereotype of the Austrian as the nest-besmircher who hates his country and its people. Sure, there might be ranting in Bernhard’s work, but it is [Auerbach writes] ‘never ranting for its own sake and the rants are never to be taken completely at face-value, no matter how appealing or justified the target’.

As such, Hofmann is wrong to claim that Bernhard’s texts are ‘sculptures of opinion’, each ‘a curved seamless rant’. Auerbach maintains that the ‘seams show, constantly’, particularly in [what he calls] ‘the constant lurch into the histrionic and the lack of proportion’ in Bernhard’s writing; [as he writes] ‘the way in which a Bernhard narrator will go from attacking Nazis to, say, attacking cheese’.

Auerbach’s point is that Bernhard’s narrators are not there merely to call out and satirise the hypocrisies of Austria. They inveigle against pretty much everything – including themselves. This is what makes his work more than a collection of satirical rants. Satire depends on old norms, on stable, dependable and authoritative values – on a shared sense of what is just and unjust, and ultimately of the position from which to make judgement. Bernhard’s narrators are deprived of this position, being implicated in their rhetoric, opening displaying their own weaknesses and resentments, their confused desires and foibles. As critic Gabriel Josipovici remarks, ‘for them there’s no escape, no position of invulnerability from which one can criticise others’.

*

Bernhard simply does not do standard craft-of-the-novel stuff. His famous periscopic technique, which see, as W.G. Sebald notes, Bernhard’s narratives always at least one remove from what is supposed to have happened, supplant the sureness of plot, character and dialogue which secure the verisimilitude upon which more conventional novelists depend.

Bernhard’s monomaniacal intense word-torrents give expression to a free-wheeling negativity that foregrounds the unruly voice of the narrator, forever teetering on the edge of chaos. The excesses of Bernhard’s style – one translator professes to find his allegedly arbitrary use of italics to be simply embarrassing, rendering fewer than half of them into English – are inseparable from what he has to say.

*

But what is it that Bernhard has to say? For Josipovici, Bernhard’s style evolved in the attempt to talk of what mattered to him:

the cleansing of language of its banalities; the articulation of complex and confused desires and resentments; the guilt and pain of our memories of what happened in Europe between 1933 and 1945.

Critic Stephen Dowden claims Bernard is articulating what Paul Celan called a Gegenwort, a counterword, ‘against exhausted narrative ploys and poetic forms, against inherited cultural complicity in the horrors of the twentieth century’. The familiar techniques of novelistic craft – well-rounded characters, involved and complex plotting, fulsome description etc. – only deepen this complicity. The ’structural certainties’ of conventional novels reassure us that reality remains just as it always was. Dowden: ‘if the novel had not changed much after the catastrophe, then it must mean that the world, despite everything that has happened, was still pretty much the same too’.

But as Bernhard says on the occasion of winning one of many literary prizes, ‘the time for tales is over, the tales of cities and the tales of States and all the scientific tales … the universe itself is no longer a tale. Europe, the most beautiful Europe, is dead – that is the truth.’ Europe is dead – the European dream is over. And storytelling is over, too, if it isn’t to simply perpetuate tired old dreams.

What then, when all the theodicies and their secular offshoots have run aground; when there is no apocalypse to bring about the promise of renewal? What then?

*

Thomas Bernhard keeps the faith.

His narrators lack the reassurance of old norms, of stable, dependable and authoritative values. They lack, furthermore, a safe position from which they can judge the world around them, coherent only in collapse, at the edge of chaos. They implicate themselves in their own rhetoric, wildly protesting against everything and nothing, from Nazism and the Austrian Catholic church to … cheese.

But they keep the faith – their version of the ‘obligation to express’ which Beckett professes in his dialogue with Georges Duthuit. ‘The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express’, says Beckett. With respect to Bernhard’s work, and perhaps that of the other literary writers I have mentioned, this this can be rewritten as follows: nothing to say in this world, nothing to express in this world, no means of expression in this world – nothing, except the obligation of the counterword, the questioning of what is and what is not complicit with the horrors.

Does this mean Bernhard dreams of an apocalypse that would put an end to this world? It does not. For him – like Beckett, Blanchot and others – there is no other world, which means that all the literary writer can offer is a way of writing against. For Beckett and Blanchot, this means ever-new strategies of stripping away literary figurations of selfhood, abandoning traditional plot until the obligation to write reveals itself, in Jeff Fort’s phrase as ‘an empty necessity that insists all the more brutally for being voided of its contents’.

Bernhard’s work does not show the same kind of narrative exhaustion, destituted personhood, but might also be understood to explore its impoverished conditions. Bernhard’s literary antinomianism is revealed in a famous phrase particularly important to Stephen Mitchelmore, indeed forming the main title of his second collection of literary essays: the opposite direction.

The phrase comes from a famous passage from, The Cellar, one of Bernhard’s autobiographical writings. Fifteen-year-old Bernhard, just emerged from his horrific schooling and looking for a job, presses the woman at the labour exchange for a job that might take him ‘in the opposite direction’ [die entgegengesetzte Richtung]. Here’s the passage:

I knew why I had made [her] take out dozens of cards from her card-index: it was because I wanted to go in the opposite direction. This was the phrase I had repeated to myself over and over again on my way to the labour exchange. Again and again I had used the phrase in the opposite direction. The woman did not understand what I meant, for I actually told her that I wanted to go in the opposite direction. She probably thought I was out of my mind, for I used the phrase to her several times. How can she possibly understand me, I thought, when she knows nothing about me, not the slightest thing? Driven to desperation by me and her card-index, she offered me a number of apprenticeships, but none of them was in the opposite direction and I had to turn them down. I did not just want to go in a different direction – it had to be the opposite direction, a compromise being no longer possible. So the woman had to go on taking cards out of her card-index and I had to go on rejecting the addresses on the cards , because I refused to compromise: I wanted to go in the opposite direction, not just a different one.

And so on, over the next few pages, showing how the young Bernhard ended up as a grocer’s apprentice in a freezing cellar in a rough part of town.

In the opposite direction: The repetition of the phrase, Mitchelmore comments opens ‘a void in language’. ‘This may be the reason why Bernhard was unable to explain what he meant to the official at the labour exchange’, he explains. ‘The words become a void in which the infinite drops into the finite’.

A void in which the infinite drops into the finite: how might we understand Mitchelmore’s suggestive claim? Is it that the repetition of the phrase, ‘in the opposite direction’ has made it lose its denotative power – its referentiality, its power of description, its power to show or tell?

There might be something to this. I hear in it an echo of Paul’s ‘as though not’ – a suspension of relations and actions in the world in view of the Second Coming. Except that there is no coming messiah for Bernhard. There is no culminating apocalypse. Which means there’s no hope at all, or so it seems.

*

The Cellar recounts how Bernhard catches a terminal lung disease contracted in the titular cellar, where he serves his apprenticeship. He ends up in a sanatorium, his illness destroying his dreams of becoming a singer. This is the same period in which he loses his beloved grandfather, and his mother. A grim volume, which follows the earlier one which recounts his terrible years as a schoolboy in wartime Salzburg, the town under constant aerial bombardment and the young Bernhard full of suicidal desires.

But Bernhard also recalls moments of joy in his autobiographies. One of them, chronologically the first in the sequence but actually written last, is a cycling trip taken on a borrowed bike. Bernhard is eight years old. He’s off to see his aunt in Salzburg, a trip of twenty-two miles – a forbidden journey! An exhausting journey! And he can’t even reach the pedals whilst siting on the saddle! Bernhard-as-a-boy worries about being punished, but he hopes his audacity will be so admired that his offence will be forgiven.

The eight-year-old grows weary. One of his stockings is torn and covered in oil. His bike-chain breaks, and he tumbles into a ditch. It’s dark, and there are several miles to go … For a while, cycling, he stood up into the wind like the protagonist of Kafka’s fragment ‘If one were only an Indian’, as if ‘on a racing horse, leaning against the wind’. His silver-painted bike became a steed without spurs, without reins … That was his joy: a fleetness of movement, a cycling away …

And then there’s the passage I have already mentioned where fifteen-year-old Bernhard seeks out a job that really was in the opposite direction.

It’s here that we might see some intriguing parallels with Paul of Tarsus.

The apostle Paul transvalues the ugliness of death on the Cross into a symbol of triumph. Bernhard transmutes values of sober investment in the future, pursuance of a recommended career, etc. into comically perverse defiance. Paul celebrates what Taubes calls ‘a subterranean society, a little bit Jewish, a little Gentile, nobody knows, what sort of lowlifes are these anyway’. Bernhard goes out among the working-class of as an antidote to stifling hypocrisies of middle-class Salzburg.

Paul turns his followers inward, interiorising the messianic idea. The young Bernhard, turns to a passionate but groundless inward faith in the opposite direction. The comparison seemingly breaks apart in their respective styles. Paul’s letters show a command of rhetorical skill, arguably continuing the Hellenist tradition of homonoia or concord speech, designed to attain unity. Bernhard’s writing, with his passion for underlining, the idiosyncrasies of his use of tense, the complex syntax of his opening sentences, his direct speech within direct speech and reported speech within reported speech, might seem to be doing something very different, aiming at anything but concord. His work is held together at speed, at an eight-year old’s cyclist’s speed, at the speed of a fifteen-year-old bolting off in the opposite direction, at the speed of a mature narrator of Bernhard leaving the ghastly dinner party of Woodcutters. His work can often seem on the verge of simply falling apart. But perhaps we might discover a concern with concord.

Bernhard in an interview: ‘what I write can be understood only if one realizes that the musical component comes first and only then what I narrate. Once the former is established, I can begin to describe things and events. The problem lies in the how.’ And he goes on: ‘the musical element affords as much satisfaction as playing the cello, in fact more, as my pleasure in the music is compounded by my pleasure in the idea I want to express'  …

The ideas I want to express: it might be here that we discover a desire for concord after all in Bernhard’s prose: a harmony between the hyperbole of the style and the hyperbole of the subject matter. And this is what we find in the musicality and relentless rhythm of his prose.

There is, of course, a danger to rhythm. Emmanuel Levinas warns us that it can effect ‘a sort of passage from oneself to anonymity’. Poetry and music threaten to captivate us, to lull our instincts. We might think here of the music of the prose of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who, like Bernhard, threw out much of the familiar furniture of the novel.

Blanchot finds Heidegger’s Nazism particular repugnant because the German philosopher is a writer. The experience of writing, for Blanchot, delivers the author to an experience of depersonalisation that is a polar opposite to the certainties of authority and identity. Blanchot attributes his own turn from his far-right political affiliations to his writing of fiction.

What about Céline, whose ignominy is such that Blanchot never mentions him in his writings? Perhaps we could argue that his wartime writings utterly compromise the discoveries he made in his pre-war fiction. The latter, with their own rhythms their splintering of the traditional sentence, can perhaps be recuperated as offering a counterword, but his oeuvre remains tainted as Bernhard’s does not.

I want, in closing, to think about the ‘as though not’ of Bernhard’s writing, the empty transcendence, the hidden knowledge that might speak to us in our Gnosticism. I want to understand what Mitchelmore calls ‘a void in which the infinite drops into the finite’ might be understood affirmatively, even joyfully, despite what we might see as the grimness of Bernhard’s work.

‘Optimists write badly’, according to Paul Valéry. Blanchot’s rejoinder: ‘But pessimists do not write’. The worse is not, so long as we can say,’ This is the worst’, says Edgar in King Lear. Bernhard sings this is the worst. Bernhard renders musical the this is the worst. ‘In the dark times, will there be singing?’ asks a poem by Brecht. And it answers: ‘there will be singing about the dark times’.

Bernhard’s repeated phrase, ‘in the opposite direction’ is an intensifier, a force of active nihilation which becomes a rising, an acceleration, even a jubilation. There is the joy of outcycling or outstriding or outrunning the world. There is great joy in his work as it affirms its own virtuosity in hyperbolic invective, as it lets its blunderbuss scatter at some deserving targets. A joy of rhythm, not in the sense of a pulsed beat, but a dance of language, that Dionysianism that unites death and chaos with both desire and the affirmation of life. A music that creates as it destroys.

I’ll finish with a quotation from the very end of Woodcutters, the protagonist of which has escaped a dreadful dinner party hosted by an artistic couple in Vienna:

I ran through the streets as though I were running away from a nightmare, running faster and faster toward the Inner City, not knowing why I was running in that direction, since to get home I would have had to go in the opposite direction, but perhaps I did not want to go home. […]. It was four in the morning, and I was running in the direction of the Inner City when I should have been going home. I went on running, running, running, […] and as I ran it seemed to me that I was running away from the Auersberger nightmare, and with ever greater energy I ran away from the Auersberger nightmare and toward the Inner City, and as I ran I reflected that the city through which I was running, dreadful though I had always felt it to be and still felt it to be, was still the best city there was, that Vienna, which I found detestable and had always found detestable, was suddenly once again the best city in the world, my own city, my beloved Vienna, and that these people, whom I had always hated and still hated and would go on hating, were still the best people in the world: I hated them, yet found them somehow touching—I hated Vienna, yet found it somehow touching—I cursed these people, yet could not help loving them—I hated Vienna yet could not help loving it. And as I went on running, I thought: I’ve survived this dreadful artistic dinner, just as I’ve survived all the other horrors. I’ll write about this artistic dinner in the Gentzgasse, I thought, without knowing what I would write—simply that I would write something about it. And as I went on running I thought: I’ll write something at once, no matter what—I’ll write about this artistic dinner in the Gentzgasse at once, now. Now, I thought—at once, I told myself over and over again as I ran through the Inner City—at once, I told myself, now—at once, at once, before it’s too late.

It is worth situating another of Fisher’s arguments concerning The Fall’s popular modernism in this context. Fisher astutely proposes of 1982’s Hex Enduction Hour that:

…[Its] textual expectorations were nothing so genteel as stream of consciousness: they seemed to be gobbets of linguistic detritus ejected direct from the mediatised unconscious, unfiltered by any sort of reflexive subjectivity. Advertising, tabloid headlines, slogans, pre-conscious chatter, overheard speech were masticated into dense schizoglossic tangles… Hex converts any linguistic content, whether it be polemic, internal dialogue, poetic insight into the hectoring form of advertising copy or the screaming ellipsis of headline-speak. The titles of ‘Hip Priest’ and ‘Mere Pseud Mag Ed’, as urgent as fresh newsprint, bark out from some Vorticist front page of the mind… Intent was unreadable. Everything sounded like a citation, embedded discourse, mention rather than use. (Fisher, 2007)

Elsewhere, Fisher refers to Jean Baudrillard’s ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’ and ‘the schizophrenia of media systems which overwhelm all interiority’ (Fisher, 2006). Though Fisher does not acknowledge it, we seem to be somewhat beyond ‘popular modernism’ here and into the territory of the postmodern. If Smith was indeed the archetypal ‘schizo’ who could ‘no longer produce the limits of his own being’ and was ‘only a pure screen, a switching center for networks of influence’ as Baudrillard has it (1983: 133), this does not bode well in terms of the potential of working class weird resistance to the kinds of ‘authentocratic’ manipulations theorised by Kennedy. In fact, the absence of ‘reflexive subjectivity’ in The Fall’s ‘dense schizoglossic tangles’ is directly comparable to the effacement of actual working class voices in current conservative discourse; as Kennedy notes, the ‘rhetoric of “listening” [is], in reality, a way of talking over people’s heads’ (Kennedy, 2018: 86).

Yet this is a problematic reading in a number of ways. To begin with, an understanding of The Fall’s work through a Baudrillardian prism suffers from an issue common to much postmodernist and post-structuralist theory, which attempts to declare an end to centred subjectivity and agency. Yet it often continues to acknowledge ideology and thus, indirectly, materiality, power relations and the associated agencies and interests of social subjects (in Baudrillard’s terms, ‘influence’). Even if we were to treat The Fall’s work as subjectless, a position Jameson at times entertains regarding Wyndham Lewis, it may yet retain a redemptive quality. For Jameson, following the anti-humanist Marxism of Louis Althusser and Pierre Macharey, the explicit and ‘obsessive’ reactionary features of Lewis’s work make of it an ‘impersonal registering apparatus’ for the ‘ugliness’ that continues to lurk beneath ‘liberal revisionism’. Lewis’s writing is thus valuable in the sense that it involuntarily exposes ‘protofascism’ for what it is in no uncertain terms (Lewis, 1979: 21–22). We could construe the ‘schizoglossic tangles’ of Fall lyrics similarly. The same ironic formal distance which acts to cast doubt on Smith as working class spokesperson here allows those lyrics to highlight the obscene reality of the bigotry and misanthropy implicitly laid at the door of an ill-defined and racially homogenised working class – and by extension the obscenity and crassness of this ideological alibi on the part of the establishment: ‘The Classical’ contains the lines ‘where are the obligatory niggers?’… ‘there are twelve people in the world/the rest are paste’… whilst the narrator of ‘Fortress/Deerpark’ complains ‘I had to go round the gay graduates in the toilets’ (1982).

Still, though, the question of agency remains. The consciousness of social groups, their allegiances and antagonisms, may be materially and systemically determined – but people make their own history, even if it is not in circumstances of their own choosing. Thus the intent of Fall songs may not always be as ‘unreadable’ as Fisher makes out. This is so even on the same LP that he characterises as a ‘teeming… expansive’ culmination of the band’s paratextual, intertextual output, apparently devoid of an author-God.

‘Hip Priest’, for instance, is as popular modernist as the rest of Hex Enduction Hour: oblique, fragmented and featuring disorienting perspectival shifts in narration reinforced by the occasional doubling of Smith’s vocal line. Nevertheless, it is difficult not to attribute a biographical significance to the mantric repetition of the line ‘he is not appreciated’, accompanied as it is by the singer’s identification of himself as the eponymous hip priest – not to mention Smith’s extratextual public reputation as a truculent outsider, which he had already established by the time of the song’s release. ‘He’s gonna make an appearance’, Smith declares performatively, before intimating the purpose of this appearance. Drinking ‘from small brown bottles since I was so long’, getting his ‘last clean dirty shirt out of the wardrobe’, the hip priest may be read as the retort of the working class weird to the attempts of ‘the good people’, liberal and conservative alike, to contain, exploit, corral and speak for it. Revelling in excess, disarray and grime, the phrase ‘since I was so long’ rather than the more familiar ‘so high’ implying a base horizontality in opposition to bourgeois uprightness, the hip priest is the atavistic avatar of working class weird revolt.

Wilkinson, D., (2020) “Mark E. Smith, Brexit Britain and the Aesthetics and Politics of the Working Class Weird”, Open Library of Humanities 6(2), 11. doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.535

Do you blame anyone or anything for you being alive?

Not at all. But I wouldn’t want to inflict it on anyone else . . . I cannot understand having children. Even if the opportunity arose, I would definitely turn it down. No, I don’t blame anyone for bringing me into the world, but I do feel that life is excessively overrated.

So you fell in love with images.

It wasn’t really my fault that images rather than people appealed to me. There were a lot of people about . . . I went to school and briefly to work, I did see people. I lived on a heavily populated council estate. There were people all around. But no one was bothered to penetrate this great wall there was between us. Yes, I was selfish. But I was also, and remain so, the sort of person that not many people want to know. It’s hard to believe!

You were forced to construct your own reality?

Yes. This took me a long time. But more importantly, I think that when someone is not at all popular, for whatever reasons, one tends to develop certain forms of survival. A survival which excludes friends, which excludes social activities. That in a sense is how I organised my life. If you cannot impress people simply by being part of the great fat human race, then you really do have to develop other skills. And if you don’t impress people by the way you look, then you really do have to develop other skills. And if you are now going to ask is everything I did just a way to gain some form of attention, well that’s not entirely true. It is in a small way, but that’s in the very nature of being alive.

Wanting to be loved?

To be seen, above all else. I wanted to be noticed, and the way I lived and do live has a desperate neurosis about it because of that. All humans need a degree of attention. Some people get it at the right time, when they are thirteen or fourteen, people get loved at the right stages. If this doesn’t happen, if the love isn’t there, you can quite easily just fade away. This could have happened to me easily. Several times I was close to . . . fading away. It doesn’t give me great comfort to talk about it. I do not wish to relive those experiences. But I came close . . . In a sense I always felt that being troubled as a teenager was par for the course. I wasn’t sure that I was dramatically unique. I knew other people who were at the time desperate and suicidal. They despised life and detested all other living people. In a way that made me feel a little bit secure. Because I thought, well, maybe I’m not so intense after all. Of course, I was. I despised practically everything about human life, which does limit one’s weekend activities.

What else was there?

Nothing. Books. Television. Records. Overall, it’s a vast wasteland.

Has the memory of those years been destroyed?

No, not at all. I remember it all in great detail, I seem to remember it every night and re-experience the embarrassment of it. It was horror. The entire school experience, a secondary modern in Stretford called St Mary’s. The horror of it cannot be overemphasised. Every single day was a human nightmare. In every single way that you could possibly want to imagine. Worse . . . the total hatred. The fear and anguish of waking up, of having to get dressed, having to walk down the road, having to walk into assembly, having to do those lessons . . . I’m sure most people at school are very depressed. I seemed to be more depressed than anyone else. I noticed it more.

So how, after all this, did the ‘great call’ come?

The great call . . . that sounds very nice. In a sense, it was always there. But I felt by the time I reached 21, 22, 23, that it couldn’t possibly be there. I couldn’t see how it could be in pop music. I was paralysed for a start. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t imagine dancing, and I felt that movement was practically the whole point of the absurd ritual. I could just about imagine singing, but even then I didn’t really know what to do with the microphone and the mike stand. But I had this strange mystical calling. There’s no need to laugh! Once again, because I had such an intense view about taking one’s life, I imagined that this must be my calling, suicide, nothing more spectacular or interesting. I felt that people who eventually took their own lives were not only aware that they would do so in the last hours or weeks or months of their life. They had always been aware of it. They had resigned themselves to suicide many years before they actually did it. In a sense I had, yes.

What stopped you?

I made records. I got the opportunity to make records, and miraculously it all worked.

So has being Morrissey saved your life?

It has been a blessing and a burden. It saved me and pushed me forward into a whole new set of problems.

Problems you seem to quite enjoy.

No I do not! Why do people insist that I scour the world and life searching wilfully for atrocities to punish myself with?

But you always seem to derive pleasure from anxiety.

It was always a very insular pleasure. It was always a matter of walking backwards into one’s bedroom and finding the typewriter and perhaps hearing much more in pop music than was really there. The point is, I had always entertained the idea of making records and just as the door seemed to be closing and I was thinking less and less about it happening, I got the chance. Suddenly those avenues were open and I utilised them.

What did you think would happen?

I felt that it would be either totally embraced or universally despised. In a way, both things happened. I often think that people take me either insultingly lightly or uncomfortably, obsessively, neurotically seriously. I was obsessed with fame, and I couldn’t see anyone in the past in film or music who resembled me. So it was quite different to see a niche of any sort. So when I started to make records, I thought, well, rather than adopt the usual poses I should just be as natural as I possibly could, which of course wasn’t very natural at all. For me to be making records at all was entirely unnatural, so really that was the only way I could be. Unnatural. Which in a sense was my form of rebellion, because rebellion in itself had become quite a tradition, certainly after punk. I didn’t want to follow through those established forms of appearance and rebellion. And by the time I was making records, I was 23, an old, thoughtful 23, so I knew there were certain things that I wanted to do. I was very certain. And I do feel very underrated, by and large, considering what I have achieved.

Was it easy?

Success is never easy. It could have gone hopelessly wrong for me. It never really gelled until the fourth single.

If it hadn’t worked, would you be dead now?

I would certainly be in intensive care.

Paul Morley interviews Morrissey in Blitz in 1988

DURAS: I know hippies, kids well. My son is a sort of kid too. There is an almost irrepressible repulsion against knowledge and culture. They don't read anything. This is something fundamental, something entirely new […] This is what young people are doing, you know. On the international level they are creating a vacuum.

RIVETTE: If it's an active operation, yes, but isn't there the danger, in fact, that this operation of creating a void, which is something active, may become a purely passive state?

DURAS: They have to go through a passive stage. That's what I think. They're in this stage now.

RIVETTE: Yes, but going through a passive stage is still an activity. If I may make a play on words . . .

DURAS: Yes, but I don't really agree with you there. Because they don't do anything. They excel at not doing anything. Getting to that point is fantastic. Do you know how not to do anything at all? I don't. This is what we lack most . . . They create a void, and all this . . . this recourse to drugs, I think is a . . . It's not at all an alibi, it's a means. I'm certain of that. Do you think so too? They're creating a vacuum, but we can't yet see what is going to replace what was destroyed in them—it's much too early for that.

[…] But even if they're not politically aware, they nonetheless represent a political force.

RIVETTE: That is to say that by their number, they represent something that is a “gap” in the system, but can this gap suffice to block the system?

DURAS: No, they represent a question, a question that weighs as heavily as a mountain: What now?

RIVETTE: But can this question block the system? On the contrary, isn't this system powerful enough to finally work its way around it, to isolate it, to make it a sort of abscessed pocket?

DURAS: But if this state of affairs gets worse, it will be a terrible thing. If it gets worse, it's the end of the world . . . If all the young people in the world start doing nothing . . . the world is in danger. So much the better. So much the better.

RIVETTE: Yes, but it's like going out on strike. It has to be really a total, absolute, general strike . . .

DURAS: Yes, precisely, precisely. It's like a strike.

RIVETTE: But it's necessary . . .

DURAS: For there to be Soviets.

[…] By definition—and here Marcuse is right, though I don't agree with him on all points—by definition they are outside the circuit of production. The hippie is a creature who has absolutely no ties with anything. He is not only outside every sort of security, every sort of social welfare, but outside of everything. Of all the means of production, of any sort of definition.

NARBONI: It's precisely at this point that I can no longer follow this sort of negation, this return to zero, because the gravest risk seems to me to be a deviation of a religious type, an almost religious conception of revolution, which to my mind is very dangerous.

DURAS: I don't see the religious side you see. A void is something that you live. There is no religion based on a void. Or, if you will, there is an age-old instinct that impels these young people to go in for almost any sort of mysticism, whether it be Maoism or Hinduism, for the moment, but I think this is an incidental factor. That's all the farther it goes. Or else, you might put it that China is having a great mystico-communist experience; I quite agree. I also believe that they are trying to reach the zero-point; but they are taking a very unusual path to get there. For obviously the cult of personality . . . But it is doubtless necessary to go by way of this axis, this pivot-point: Mao is like a sort of geographical point, perhaps, nothing more. As one says “Mao's China” . . . a rallying point . . . Perhaps it's different from what happened in Russia. One hopes so . . .

NARBONI: The idea underlying the principle of destroy is that once a type of real communication between people is re-established . . .

DURAS: An almost physical type, if you will . . .

NARBONI: . . . the revolution will follow. I don't believe this. I don't believe that if people managed to talk to each other, to communicate, this would be enough to necessarily bring about revolution. This seems to me to obscure a fundamental problem, one that doesn't stem from individual, intersubjective relations—that of class struggle.

DURAS: You are right. But is it revolution that has made the revolution? Do you believe in revolutions ordered up from Yalta? And in like manner: is it poetry that made poetry? I don't believe so. I think that all of Europe is a prey to false revolutions. Revolutions against people's will. So then, what will make revolution?

NARBONI: To get back to this idea of a void, of clean hands almost—I really think that this is to fall back into a sort of abstract idea of a rejection of every thing that is almost Christian . . . […]

DURAS: There's a gap between hope and despair, if you will. Where it's both together. A gap that can't be described yet. I think it escapes description. It is what I call the void, the zero point. Perhaps the word “void” is going too far . . . the zero point. The neutral point. Where sensitivity regroups, if you will, and rediscovers itself . . . Anyway: it is said that there are more and more disturbed people. Madmen: mental institutions everywhere are full of them. This to me is profoundly reassuring. It clearly proves that the world is intolerable and that people feel it to be so. It merely proves that people's sensitivity is increasing. And intelligence . . . Do you see? I think that we must turn ourselves around. We must reason backwards now about many things. Everybody is neurotic, of course, because everybody is well aware that the world is intolerable. More and more so. And a place where we can't even breathe. Do you agree with this?

NARBONI: Absolutely. These are precisely the consequences of that state of affairs.

DURAS: But it's a hope that I'm expressing. I hope that there will be more and more madmen: I make this statement with pleasure, with satisfaction. Personally. It proves that the solution is near. The premises of a solution. Because I know that we are very, very far away. But here we touch on the problem of freedom. This very moment. We're on the very edge of it. […]

These young people don't want to do anything. Anything at all. They want to be bums. I have a son who doesn't want to do anything. He says straight out: I don't want to do anything. He wrote me one day saying: “Be carefree parents; don't feel responsible for my adolescence any more; I don't want to be a success at anything in my life; that doesn't interest me. I'll never do anything.” He went off traveling all through North Africa . . . And he was often hungry; he was very thin when he came back. He took responsibility for the whole thing on his own shoulders. A sort of exemplary freedom, that I respect. It would be impossible to force work in an office, or a job as a messenger boy, as a TV assistant on this boy; I don't think I have any right to do that. […]

Don't get the idea that things were easy for me before I arrived at the point where I said to my son: “Do what you want to.” I had to do a fantastic amount of work on myself. Moreover, I believe I wouldn't have written Destroy if I hadn't had this child. He's wild. He's impossible, but he has found something . . . something that's outside of all the rules. A freedom. He enjoys the use of his freedom. He possesses it. This is extremely rare. And I often observe hippies: my son goes around with them, there's a whole group of them . . . What is curious is that when you go from one to the other, you see hardly any difference at all in their relations with adults. It is within the group that they become different, do you see what I mean? They form a sort of common front against us. A friendly one. Not a violent one. But they all turn the same face toward us. When you come right down to it, you can't get to know them. You're going to think that it's because I have this son that I defend hippies: that would be too simple . . . One of his pals slept through the baccalaureat exam. They found him there asleep. Not a word. He didn't write a single word.

Duras interviewed (Destroy, She Said, appendix)

Far from being troubled by your letter I am very touched that you should tell me about your great sorrow. I wish I could find something to comfort you. All I could say, and much more, and much better, you will have said to yourself long ago. And I have so little light and wisdom in me, when it comes to such disaster, that I can see nothing for us but the old earth turning onward and time feasting on our suffering along with the rest. Somewhere at the heart of the gales of grief (and of love too, I’ve been told) already they have blown themselves out. I was always grateful for that humiliating consciousness and it was always there I huddled, in the innermost place of human frailty and lowliness. To fly there for me was not to fly far, and I’m not saying this is right for you. But I can’t talk about solace of which I know nothing.

Samuel Beckett, letter to Barbara Bray

How must we imagine your actual script to look like?

It’s a written book that is rather open and loose, a statement of intent that sometimes describes what we’re looking for, or a subtext. It can be very detailed in respect to dialogues. During the actual shoot, it is very important for me to put this script aside and only remember it. And then I tell the actors what I remember and together we then rehearse the dialogue. This then takes the form of trial and error, a process through which the characters make the lines of dialogue their own, and I find that works very well. I found it very inspiring to read an interview with Miloš Forman in which he explains that for his film Černý Petr (Black Peter, 1964) he gave the actors the script and then a week before shooting he demanded of them to return it. So they had a general notion of the story and the dialogue, but they were forced to work only with what they remembered – this process I found fascinating, so I stole it.

Valeska Grisebach, interviewed

I used to say that each film shoots itself. Film, like an animal or creature, chooses what it needs, what it wants, for living. And I am absolutely a person who believes in the fate of the film. If a film is huge, it wants to be huge. If it wants to be a chamber piece, then it will be a chamber piece. If a film needs this actor, this actor will be free. For instance, now I’m working on a new film, and I have an episode that I was hesitant about. I wasn’t sure if it was necessary or not, but I left it in and decided that we could just fix it in the edit if we couldn’t find the right actor for the scene. Then we found a guy who told us, “Okay, I’m free. I’m happy to do it.” And then he broke his leg! It was then that I understood that the film doesn’t want this episode. So I cut it out.

Kirill Serebrennikov, interviewed

My Weil readings:

Tues August 29th, Manchester: Blackwells, 6.30. Book here. 

Weds September 6th, London: Liberia, details to follow.

Thurs September 8th, Hastings: The Hastings Bookshop, details to follow.

Publishers Weekly review of My Weil. 

Iyer (Nietzsche and the Burbs) delves into the lives of a group of PhD students in this satirical outing. Johnny, the narrator, leads a misfit band of philosophers as they procrastinate writing their dissertations and ponder the concept of the apocalypse in Manchester, England. When a new student named Simone Weil joins their ranks, the group becomes infatuated with her, each for varying reasons. Ismail sees her as a symbol of purity in their tainted world, as she dedicates herself to helping the homeless in at-risk areas; Johnny falls in love with her. When Simone is stabbed and ends up in the hospital, their idealized view of her becomes etched in stone. Soon after, the city’s electric grid shuts down, and the group explores a mystical landfill called the Ees, where they consume potent psychedelic mushrooms. Either an apocalypse actually happens or it’s a hallucination—Iyer isn’t clear. Amid this chaos, Johnny finds himself in a house at the center of the Ees, accompanied by Simone, who no longer recalls her saintly persona. Iyer pokes fun at his characters and their pretentious references to music by Joy Division and films like Tarkovsky’s Stalker, though he takes seriously his theme of existential dread. Memorable characters make this a singular exploration of the human condition. (Aug.)

'Exodus' is the third in a trilogy – will we be seeing more from Lars and W. (and perhaps those elusive Essex post-graduates) in the future?

That’s all from Lars and W. for now. You have to know when to quit! Think of the last few seasons of The Sopranos! Having said that, there are some interesting real-life events coming up which might lend themselves, one day, to fictional treatment. For example, we’re bringing some of the Italian philosophers I mention in the trilogy to Oxford in April. And there are some parts of the backstories of Lars and W. still left unexplored …

This book is almost as long as Spurious and Dogma put together, and feels more expansive somehow – was there a reason for this wider scope?

I wanted to say everything, in some way. To say it all in this strange new style I’ve developed, to say everything it can allow me to say. And I wanted to draw together everything I’d written so far, to follow all the hares to their lairs …

Would you say Exodus is a more serious work than the previous two novels? There seems to be a more overtly political aspect to this one. Do W.'s feelings about the current state of academia in this country chime with your own?

The trilogy is set in neoliberal Britain in the mid- to late 2000s, but I also wanted to explore the way its characters had been shaped by the turn to neoliberal capitalism in the Thatcher years. There’s some of this in Dogma. But Exodus deepens this account of the characters, depicting a younger W. studying in the 1980s, as part of a group of highly politicized and utopian Essex postgraduates, and a younger Lars, studying in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s in a rapidly regenerating Manchester. For his part, W. still burns with the desire for politics, but the case of Lars is more difficult to determine. Lars seems too ravaged by what Wendy Brown has called ‘quotidian nihilism’ – a general, barely individualised sense of despair – to have any real faith in political transformation.

You ask me whether I share W.’s feelings about academia. Like many others, I am worried by what Bill Readings long ago diagnosed as the collapse of the ‘idea of culture’ on which the modern university was based. The notion of ‘excellence’ that replaced this older ideal is a technocratic one, being concerned with narrow notions of productivity and market performance. For me, as for my characters W. and Lars, the humanities are in danger simply of servicing neoliberal capitalism, training students to fit in with the new ‘knowledge economy’ rather than encouraging them to more general ethical and civic reflection, and weeding out would-be academics who are not content simply to produce yet more academic papers, monographs and funding proposals.

You've mentioned daily cartoons like Peanuts as influences in previous interviews – I certainly saw elements of Garfield and Jon's relationship in that of Lars and W., a kind of outwardly relentless cruelty punctuated by moments of affection… Do you agree? Would you consider printing Spurious as a cartoon?

I’ve always thought of the W. and Lars material as a kind of comic strip. That’s how it functioned on the blog, back when I wrote in a greater variety of styles – it was supposed to be a kind of light relief, my equivalent of the ‘funnies’ at the bottom of the newspaper page. I wanted it to work in exactly the same way as Schultz’s Peanuts and George Herriman’s Krazy Kat: each daily ‘strip’ (in my case, each W. and Lars blog post) was to be free-standing enough to introduce new readers to these characters and their situations, but, at the same time, part of a longer story arc, part of a larger ‘mythology’. When I found it difficult to come up with new twists on the W. and Lars relationship, I reminded myself of Schutlz and Herriman, and what they were able to do with a tiny number of characters and a restricted range of situations.

But the trilogy could not be printed as a cartoon, for the same reason that it couldn’t be made into a play, or a film: so much of its effect depends on a narrative distancing, which means we can never be sure of the veracity of W.’s account of Lars. Is Lars really as fat as W. suggests, or as stupid? For me, it’s vital that the audience is unsure about the answer to these questions.

All three novels are written from an interesting perspective, from Lars' point of view but mainly reporting W.'s speech – yet somehow it feels natural. Why did you settle on this way of writing? 

The critic and novelist Gabriel Josipovici praises those kinds of narrative which free us from believing that the stories we tell about the world are anything other than stories, thereby allowing the world to be what it is. I hope my fiction is freeing in this way, even if the ‘otherness’ of the world, in my work, is presented as a kind of horror.

I wanted to give a sense of Lars’s presence beyond the stories W. tells about him. I wanted him to be there

My novels are centred on conversation, around the reporting of conversations. For me the human capacity to communicate is of central importance, even if it seems so obvious that we forget it. The narrative technique I employ is supposed to remind the reader of this capacity, in all its wonder.

At many points in my trilogy, nothing seems to make sense to my characters. They feel bewildered – they feel that time is out of joint, that there is no intrinsically meaningful action that they can perform, that nothing is worthwhile. Sure, W. is capable of great hope, of believing in the possibility of writing a great philosophical work, or being part of some great revolution, but he slumps back from those moments into a kind of listlessness, regathering strength only by tormenting his friend Lars, and by sharing his frustrations. For his part, Lars is sometimes presented as a contemporary equivalent to Rabelais’s Gargantua, obsessed with his appetites, but Lars, too is someone who falls victim to ‘quotidian nihilism’.

In the narrative technique I use in the trilogy, I wanted to convey to the reader the sense both of the political and philosophical energies W. feels able to summon, but also of the failure of those energies – to give a sense of W.’s efforts to project political or philosophical meaning into the world, but also of the ultimate otherness of the world, its refractoriness and even indifference to those efforts. W. is constantly running up against this meaninglessness, he’s constantly rebuffed – not least by the Gargantua-like Lars, who seems to incarnate this meaninglessness, or at least enjoy a privileged link to it.

Lars is linked in the trilogy to chaos, to the passage in the book of Genesis about ‘welter and waste’, about the world ‘without form or void’. The character of Lars, considered from W.,’s point of view, in the trilogy, as well as the damp in Spurious and the rats in Dogma and the building noise in Exodus, were ways, for me, of presenting the world in its remoteness, its otherness – the world as it is totally refractory to human concerns. Commenting on the damp and the rats in my first two novels in an essay in The New Inquiry, Saelan Twerdy writes, ‘reality is infinitely more complex and multilayered than our frame of reference normally allows for and the forms of our entanglement in it often escape us.’ I think he is right, and appreciate his reading.

But I had something else in mind in deploying my particular narrative technique. My novels are books of chatter. We hear W. speaking. We overhear the conversations he has with his friend. We encounter their banter, their faux-profundity, their sense of fun in their exchanges. In focusing on the to-and-fro of these friends, I wanted to convey the importance of human communication in allowing us to speak of the chaos that lacks both form and void. I wanted to convey the significance of friendship as it permits such communication – of a joy which remains after despair – the joy of being able to talk (and write) about contingency and meaninglessness. For me, this capacity to communicate, is part of what allows us to live in the world without experiencing it as a solely impersonal fate, as sheer otherness. In speaking, we clear our little patch in the wilderness, we live our small human lives …

You've touched on the philosophers that are frequently mentioned in all three books. Did you feel it was a risk to include some of the more esoteric references, that the average fiction reader may be unfamiliar with? I certainly had to scramble Wikipedia a few times. 

The most crucial philosophical references in the trilogy are to those late-nineteenth and twentieth century Jewish philosophers, who saw the meaning-giving significance of human communication, which they understood as speech. Does it matter if the reader is unfamiliar with Rosenzweig or Hermann Cohen? Not at all! The ‘message’ of the trilogy – of the importance of friendship, of love, centred on speech, is present in the very form of the trilogy – in its most basic narrative technique. It’s my hope that the reader is made to experience what very obscure and difficult philosophers like Rosenzweig have taught without any knowledge of those philosophers whatsoever. 

I wanted to talk a bit more about the apocalypse, in its various forms. W. is convinced that the world is about to end, at times almost hopeful for it, and that 'the language of the end times is wholly appropriate to our times'. Do you think that the end of the world is something that we all secretly crave?

The characters do indeed believe that they are living in the ‘end times’, just as many thinkers have believed this before them. W. and Lars really do believe that the apocalypse is around the corner. But there is a crucial difference between W. and Lars and the millenarians that Norman Cohn has written about in his Pursuit of the Millennium (a book I explicitly reference in Exodus): my characters cannot believe that the apocalypse will actually reveal anything, will actually make things clear. Etymologically, the word, ‘apocalypse’, suggests a kind of unveiling, a revelation. The apocalypse is supposed to show God’s plan for the world. But what if there is no plan, and nothing to reveal? It’s no wonder that W. and Lars sometimes give in to despair!

Of course, as the work of Cohn shows us, there has always been a not-so-secret desire for apocalypse. It’s the moment of judgement, when the wicked are punished, and the meek rewarded. Yes, the apocalypse involves destruction, but it is a destruction in the name of a new hope, a destruction in the name of the Messiah, of the messianic age. The apocalypse is a moment in which the Messiah intervenes in human history. But what happens when you have no faith in a final judgement, in the coming of the Messiah, or in the opening of the messianic age? Instead of the ‘end times’, there is only an endless end, the continual resurgence of chaos and meaninglessness.

Things might seem hopeless for W. and Lars – they are overwhelmed by the ‘welter and waste’. But they actually have hope, which takes the form of their capacity to speak, to converse, to communicate. For the Jewish philosophers I have mentioned, messianism is to be found in human communication, in speech. Even in the ‘endless end’ of climatic and financial catastrophe, W. and Lars are still able to speak about the catastrophe. That, by itself, is a source of hope. Granted, it’s not going to prevent the catastrophe in question, but it does allow a kind of distancing from it. The characters, through their humorous exchanges concerning the catastrophe, are, for that reason, never its passive victims.

Let me make the point in another way. Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is not simply a play about absurdity, about the fruitless waiting for a messianic figure who never comes. It is about characters talking as they wait, making meaning and amusing themselves in the meantime. It is actually in this talk that the ‘messianism’ of Beckett’s play lies, its lived capacity for hope. Sure, all the speech in the world isn’t going to make Godot keep his appointment. The Messiah isn’t actually going to turn up. But the friendship between Vladimir and Estragon is rich with meaning, with messianism, even if it seems that the characters are obsessed with meaninglessness and failure. Beckett’s play shows us how chatter is anything but insignificant, since it is part of the all-too-human effort to make meaning. Not only that, but it sets this effort against the constantly acknowledged otherness of the world. It is in this tension between meaning-making and meaninglessness, between the human and the inhuman, that Waiting for Godot is alive to me as a work of art.

There is a yearning for other places in other times that dominates all three novels, and especially for 'Old Europe'. Kafka's Prague, Kierkegaard's Denmark… Yet Lars and W. are permanently grounded in monotony – lager on trains and reduced-price sandwiches. Was it important to you to harness them to the here and now, even as they try and escape it?

Yes, W. and Lars find themselves mired in the ‘endless end’ of ordinary life in neoliberal Britain, with all its petty frustrations. W., in particular, dreams of being part of a larger community – whether it be founded on political activism, in the manner of the Autonomia group of Mario Tronti and his friends, or on something more nebulous, as when W. dreams of migrating to Canada, or undertaking an expedition to the legendary land behind the North wind. W. longs to have a whole army of thinker-friends; some great unguessed-at politico-philosophical leap might be possible then, he hopes. Instead, he finds himself stuck with Lars on a train …!

I wanted, in Exodus, to give a sense of the ‘endless end’ of neoliberal Britain, with all its frustrations and trivialities. I wanted to convey ordinary, banal experiences of everyday life – those intervals when nothing much happens. It’s in such banality that you can experience ‘quotidian nihilism’, to be sure, but in which you can also find the ‘messianism’ of banter, the to-and-fro of aimless conversation.

And think my focus on the everyday allows for more than this. Absurd as W.’s dreams might seem, there is a legitimate sense that ‘life is elsewhere’ in these times – that a whole cluster of philosophical, artistic and political possibilities, linked to what my characters call ‘Old Europe’, to Modernism, has disappeared. By bringing together the dreams of this vanished Modern Europe with the mundane world of contemporary Britain, I want to indicate just how remote these vanished possibilities have become. I want the audience to feel these possibilities too, and to feel the sadness of their passing.

Of course, there is a danger, in presenting this remoteness, of falling into the very British trap of laughing at the utopian dreams of would-be intellectuals. There is a danger of reconfirming the hegemony of ‘common sense’ – of saying, in effect: of course we can’t transform the world!; of course we can’t rediscover our political agency! My aim, by contrast, was to give the reader a sense that a real loss has occurred, reawakening a sense of lost Modernist futures, even for those who live in an everyday world as seemingly devoid of possibility as do W. and Lars.

Out August 22nd.

A scathingly funny look at a group of quirky graduate students majoring in Disaster Studies who are forced to reconsider their cynicism when they confront a new student who, remarkably, has the same name as the 20th Century Catholic saint, Simone Weil . . .

My Weil follows a group of twenty-something PhD students of the new-fangled subject Disaster Studies at an inferior university in Manchester, England, the post-industrial city of so much great music and culture. They’re working class, by turns underconfident and grandiose (especially when they drink) and are reconciled to never finishing their dissertations or finding academic jobs.

From Bergman's Seventh Seal:

Everyone in Färjestad spoke of evil omens and other horrors. They say two horses devoured each other last night. Graves opened wide, and corpses lay scattered about. Four suns hung in the sky yesterday afternoon.

I want to confess as honestly as I can, but my heart is empty. And the emptiness is a mirror turned toward my own face. I see myself in it, and it fills me with loathing and horror.

My indifference to my fellow men has cut me off from their company. I live now in a world of phantoms, a prisoner of my own dreams.

What are you waiting for?
I want to know.
You want a guarantee.
Call it what you will.

Must it be so cruelly inconceivable to know God through one's senses? Why must he hide in a fog of half-spoken promises and unseen miracles? How can we believe the believers when we don't believe ourselves? What will become of us who want to believe but cannot?

And what of those who neither will nor can believe?

Why can I not kill off this God within me? Why must he live on inside me in this painful, humiliating way when I want to tear him out of my heart? Why does he remain a mocking reality that I cannot shake off?

You hear me?
I hear you.
I want knowledge. Not faith or conjecture, but knowledge. I want God to reach out his hand, show his face, speak to me. But he is silent. I cry to him in the darkness, but sometimes it feels like no one is there.
Perhaps no one is there.
Then life is just senseless horror.

No man can live facing death knowing that everything is nothingness.
Most people give no thought to death or nothingness. One day they'll stand on the far edge of life, peering into the darkness.
Ah, that day. I understand what you mean.

We carve an idol out of our fear and call it God.

My whole life has been nothing but futile wandering and pursuits, a great deal of talk without meaning. It's all been in vain. I say that without bitterness or self-reproach, knowing that most men's lives are the same. But I want to use my reprieve for one meaningful act.

We spent ten years in the Holy Land letting snakes bite us, insects sting us, wild beasts maul us, heathens attack us, bad wine poison us, women infect us, lice eat us, and fever consume us — all for the glory of God.

God has sent his punishment down on us. You shall all perish from the black death. You there, gaping like cattle, and you sitting there in your glutted complacency, don't you know that this could be your final hour? Death stands at your back. I see the crown of his head gleaming in the sun. His scythe flashes above your heads. Which of you will he strike first?
You there, staring like a goat — will nightfall see your mouth twisted into its last unfinished gasp? You, woman… blooming with lust for life and pleasure — will you grow pale and wither before the dawn? You there… with your bulbous nose and idiotic grin — do you have another year to defile the earth with your refuse? Don't you obstinate fools know you're going to die? Today, tomorrow, the next day — you're all doomed. You hear me? Doomed!
Lord, have mercy on us in our humiliation. Turn thy face not away in loathing and contempt, but be merciful to us for the sake of thy son, Jesus Christ!

They speak of Judgment Day, and there's all the evil omens. They say a woman gave birth to a calf's head. People are crazed. They flee and take the plague with them. If all that's true, then we should enjoy life as long as we're still standing.
Many have died trying to purge themselves in fire, but better to die pure than live for hell, the priests say.

This is the end — that's what it is. No one dares say it aloud, but this is the end. People are crazed with fear.

Judgment Day becomes Judgment Night, when the angels descend and graves open. It will be terrible to see.

Faith is a heavy burden, you know? It's like loving someone out in the darkness who never comes, no matter how loud you call. How unreal that all seems now here with you and your husband. How insignificant all of a sudden. Now you don't look so solemn. I will remember this moment. The stillness, the dusk … these wild strawberries, this bowl of milk … your faces in the evening light. Mikael asleep, Jof with his lyre. I'll try to remember what we spoke of…
and I'll hold this memory in my hands like a bowl of fresh milk full to the brim. And it will be a sign for me … and a source of great satisfaction.

Who's watching over that child? The angels? God? Satan? Or just emptiness?
Emptiness, sire.
That can't be!

Look in her eyes. Her poor brain's just made a discovery: emptiness in the moonlight.
No!
We stand helpless, arms hanging at our sides, for we see what she sees, and her terror is ours.
Poor child.
I can't stand it!

We know something's going to happen, but we don't know what. Judgment Day, perhaps.

From Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly:

l enter a large room. lt's bright and peaceful. People are moving back and forth. Some of them talk to me and l understand them. lt's so nice, and l feel safe. ln some of their faces there's a shining light. Everyone is waiting for him to come, but no one is anxious. They say that l can be there when it happens.

Sometimes l have this intense yearning. l long for that moment…  when the door will open … and all the faces will turn to him.
Who is coming?
No one has said for certain. But l think it's God who will reveal himself to us. That it will be him coming into the room through that door.

A god steps down from the mountain. He walks through the dark forest. There are wild beasts everywhere in the silent darkness. lt must be real. l'm not dreaming. l'm telling the truth. Now l'm in one world, now in the other. l can't stop it.

You're empty but clever. Now you're trying to fill your void with Karin's extinction.

l'm powerless. l can only stand by and watch as she is transformed into a poor, tormented animal. Let me tell you something. When l was in Switzerland l decided to kill myself. l hired a car and found a cliff. l set out calmly. lt was afternoon. The valley was already in darkness. l was empty. No fear, no regrets, no expectations. l aimed the car at the cliff stepped on the gas … and stalled, stopping dead.
The transmission went out, you see. The car slid on the gravel and came to a halt, front wheels over the edge. l crawled out of the car, trembling. l leaned against a rock across the road. l sat gasping for breath for hours.
Why are you telling me this?
To tell you l no longer have any pretence to keep up. The truth won't bring catastrophe. From the void within me something was born that l can't touch… Or name. A love. For Karin. And Minus. And you. One day l may tell you about it. l dare not do it now.

And then the room with the people waiting. Those good, bright-faced people waiting for the door to open … for God to come to them. Then the voices start … and l have to do as they say. l can't make sense of it all. ls it really just my illness? lt's so horrible to see your own confusion and understand it.

One draws a magic circle around oneself to keep everything out that doesn't fit one's secret games. Each time life breaks through the circle, the games become puny and ridiculous. So one draws a new circle and builds new defences.

l know it won't be long now. lt's a great comfort to know that. But our waiting has been a time of joy.

Dearest Martin, l'm sorry l was so mean just now. Couldn't you kneel down next to me and put your hands together? You look so funny and conspicuous sitting there. l know you don't believe … but for my sake, Martin. My love. My love.

But the god that came out was a spider. He came towards me … and l saw his face. It was a terrible, stony face. He crawled up and tried to force himself into me, but l defended myself. The whole time l saw his eyes. They were cold and calm. When he couldn't penetrate me, he continued up my chest … up onto my face and on up the wall. l have seen God.

Reality burst open … and l tumbled out. lt's like in a dream. Anything can happen. Anything.
l know. l can't live in this new world.
Yes, you can, but you must have something to hold on to.
l can only give you a hint of my own hope. lt's knowing that love exists for real in the human world.
A special kind of love, l suppose?
All kinds, Minus. The highest and the lowest, the most absurd and the most sublime.
All kinds of love.
The longing for love?
Longing and denial. Trust and distrust.
So love is the proof?
l don't know if love is proof of God's existence, or if love is God himself.
For you, love and God are the same.
That thought helps me in my emptiness and my dirty despair.
Tell me more, Papa.
Suddenly the emptiness turns into abundance and despair into life. lt's like a reprieve, Minus, from a death sentence.
Papa, if it is as you say, then Karin is surrounded by God, since we love her.
Yes.
Can that help her?
l believe so.

Stupidity and Unlearning: An Academic Writing Workshop - online seminar for the European Graduate School, which I ran on October 29th.

New blog for a new novel.

[Draft of an article published in ANGERMION (de Gruyter )  XIV (Dec 2021)]

The Music of Friendship: Nietzsche and the Burbs

The opportunity to discuss your own work as a novelist is a curious one. ‘Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards’, wrote Kierkegaard. It is only in an essay such as this one that I can begin to understand a literary project that occupied me for several years. We only know what we were working on once we’ve finished work; we can only know our pro-ject – etymologically, what we throw ahead of us – as a re-ject, as what is thrown behind us. Writing is lived; it is experiential and experimental, a projection into a future whose course is unknown. But understanding is retrospective; it presupposes a corpse.

This means that I confront my own work as a kind of Sphinx, an enigmatic monument the riddle of which is hard to solve. Literary fiction plays a different language game to an essay of the kind I am writing, particularly with regard to what might be called the materiality or even musicality of its language: its rhythms and sonorities, its grain. Yet it is the exactly the music of my work – both the imaginary music I write about and the music of its prose – that is my topic. 

What follows is my attempt to respond to the Sphinx, in which I remember the music of friendship at play between my characters, but also in early relationships of my own to which I want to pay tribute. This is an answer to her riddle – it’s a way of understand what I was doing, even as I know there could be many others.

*

Nietzsche and the Burbs (2019) is the second in a trilogy of novels, each of which takes a historical philosopher as its central figure, introducing an avatar of them into the contemporary world. The anachronism of these characters is the point; in each case, the reborn versions of the real Wittgenstein (Wittgenstein Jr, 2014), the real Nietzsche and, in my next novel, the real Simone Weil live at a freeing remove from their surroundings, allowing them to diagnose and attempt to address the ills of our present. Their charisma – the fascination they elicit from those around them – is a result of their seeming to come from elsewhere.

The novel is set in the contemporary UK among seventeen year old sixth-formers just about to take their A-levels. One of its central characters is a reborn Nietzsche, now a privately-schooled nineteen-year-old boy of partly German descent, who, following his father’s death and his own mental breakdown, joins a local comprehensive school sixth-form to complete his A-levels. He’s aloof, quiet, but is inveigled by some of pupils of his new school – a group of friends bored and dissatisfied by their suburban lot – to become the lead singer of their band. The friends are looking for a leader, a role which Nietzsche, as they nickname him, is reluctant to take on. But he does set them a salutary example, exuding philosophical seriousness and depth and encouraging them to deepen their supposed despair, allowing them to confront the nihilism of the suburbs.

My main characters – Art, Paula, Merv and Chandra (the narrator) – spend their time pondering life and its meaning, lamenting their suburban fate, discussing their favourite music and films as well as getting high – all that ordinary teenage stuff. The novel traces the catalytic effect my character Nietzsche has on these friends, especially as it revitalises their music-making, guiding them towards a new ethos, a non-nihilistic way of living. The title of my novel, Nietzsche and the Burbs, is the name the band takes after Nietzsche joins them as lead singer.

*

The novel is set Wokingham, a commuter-belt town about thirty miles west of London, which is part of the so-called knowledge economy spine, the so-called innovation engine, that runs through the Thames Valley. You can find most of the big multinational businesses there; tech companies thrive, along with the financial and business services firms, the pharma-bio industries, the great retail firms … There’s a huge demand for highly educated workers, a brain economy of software engineers, telecoms people and commercial staff. Housing estates are solutions to the growth-zone problem, the family-friendly problem and the easy-commute problem …The new houses aren’t exciting – they are mostly Georgian-style boxes – but they don’t need to be. Wokingham’s a pragmatic town, where there’s business to be done; aesthetics is a secondary concern.

My teen characters stand out. They don’t want to do what they’re supposed to – pursue a vocational course at uni, find an office job, settle down. They don’t want to make the suburban adjustment, and accept that this is the only world there can be. My teens have a sense of being totally managed – suburban life is paranoically controlled. Nothing, they feel, is allowed to happen. There’s no spontaneity or otherness. Pseudo-event follows pseudo-event; the future feels totally programmed, prescribed, modelled – indeed, it barely seems to exist at all. Nothing anyone says seems to mean anything – words like family, home, friend, have been hollowed out, seeming to only parody older meanings. Their families live through abstract representations that cover up a general evacuation of meaning. Homogenisation holds sway. Everyone, no matter what their origins, seems to become alike. If there are deviations – eccentricities, idiosyncrasies – they are permitted ones; there’s a way to be fun, wacky, surprising and so on in the suburbs. There’s a way to be diverse – to be gay, to be foreign, to be working class.

For my teens, formal education is mere processing, leading everyone into the office. There are a few maverick teachers at their comprehensive school: a Marxist economist, a doomy geographer obsessed with climate change, a Thomas-Bernhard reading émigré, but my teens informally educate themselves, learning from counter-cultural role models and musicians: Arthur Rimbaud and Kurt Cobain, Nadya Tolokno from Pussy Riot and the musician and former Orthodox Christian monk Jason Marler. 

My teens talk despair and suicide. They seethe with dislike for the drudge-like masses who populate their sixth form and yet feel inferior to the private school children they come across. They’re aware of the cultural capital they lack, of the great gaps in their education. They know their grades have been inflated, that their passage through school has been too easy and their time at university will be the same. What appeals (though they might deny this) is an aristocratic mode of existence; a sovereign splendour that would place them beyond the doings of the mundane world – beyond its blandness and fakery.

My teens are intellectuals of a sort, full of inchoate philosophical questions, but also crave excitement – altered states through drunkenness and drug-taking. Sometimes they search for peace, too – for open time, for interregna of various kinds: slow cycle rides, lying in the grass, smoking weed, truanting. And they have nascent artistic desires, which drive them to make music. They want to redeem their lives in some way, to make sense of their lives in the suburbs.

Enter my character Nietzsche – subdued, charismatic, ardent. He intensifies and focuses the discontent of my teens. He talks tersely about nihilism and the death of God and expresses suspicion of pity and compassion. He thinks my teens’ despair is sham and should be driven deeper. Crucially, his very presence makes them want to reform their band and to recruit him as lead singer. The novel builds towards the first gig of the band, Nietzsche and the Burbs. As the band rehearses, the teens begin to hope that their music-making might help them to overcome day to day suburban nihilism, allowing them to transfigure their lives, elevating the contingencies of their existence into something necessary. The band come to understand their music-making in philosophical terms, as a way of transforming their affective lives, allowing them to become conduits of revivifying forces.

*

Let me step back to the historical Nietzsche in order to understand the band’s ambitions.

The real, for the real Nietzsche, is in a constant state of becoming, without purpose or goal. Process is primary, not stable entities, which form and dissolve within a larger chaotic field. For Nietzsche, human life can be sustained by establishing horizons within which a community can live. These horizons are, in a sense, lies – ways of concealing chaos from ourselves. But lies are, Nietzsche argues, more valuable than truth when it comes to communal flourishing, since the lack of purpose or goal, the fact that meaning isn’t simply given, is too much to bear.

The importance of music, for Nietzsche, lies in its role in laying out the horizons in question – composing chaos into order. This is because music is able to operate directly on our bodies – on the multiplicity of passions that each of us is. We are not primarily minds or souls, but complexes of passions which, in turn, reflect deeper drives and impulses that work in and through us. These drives and impulses are manifestations of becoming – of the chaos that Nietzsche calls the will to power.

Nietzsche uses this term to refer to the fundamental struggle of becoming with itself. The will to power is the war among all things for dominance and self-overcoming. Particular entities exist insofar as they are moments of the will to power, in and through their antagonistic relations to other entities. This struggle holds sway among the passions, too. Each passion is a moment of the will to power and, as such, strives to overcome other such moments. Passions conflict. The danger is that the internal struggle of the passions leads to chaos. They need proper regulation – the body as such needs to be trained and marshalled.

*

This is where music comes in.

Traditionally, philosophers have argued that we need to exert rational control over our bodies and its passions, working to bring them into line with our intellect. However, Nietzsche argues that the role of rationality itself is relatively superficial. He argues that human beings are primarily affective rather than thinking beings and that our passions are barely open to self-examination at all. We are unable to recognise or understand the way we are shaped by drives and forces, let alone order these passions rationally.

So how, then, can we regulate our affective lives? For Nietzsche, music has a particularly strong effect on the passions. Musical modulation allows the passions to be co-ordinated or ‘rank-ordered’ as part of a harmonic whole. The dissonance of the passions can be harmonically resolved through melody, which trains and disciplines the human body not only individually, but collectively. In this way, musical discipline may produce an appropriately harmonized ethos for a community.

This is how music can be understood to transfigure the chaos of the real, to provide a communal form in the flux of becoming. Unlike rationality, which seeks to supress the passions altogether, musical harmony preserves passions in their difference, maintaining the internal tension of the body as part of a higher harmony.

*

The role of musical training is particularly important in the wake of what Nietzsche calls the ‘death of God’. Formerly, human passions were constrained and ordered by subordinating them to a rational God and rational cosmos. With the cultural decline of Christianity, this internal regulation – a whole system of instincts – begins to fail, and with it that sense of meaning, purpose and direction which comes from having a horizon within which to live.

Nietzsche isn’t nostalgic for Christianity which, for him, denigrated life, unfavourably measuring it against an eternal, rational order. But he’s also fearful for the future. New movements of thought such as positivism, materialism and utilitarianism threaten to perpetuate the unhealthy aspects of Christianity, preventing its final collapse and the possibility of rebirth. European civilization is no longer able to rank or hierarchize the passions appropriately, preventing that enlivening inner struggle on which a genuinely new, post-Christian psychic and communal ordering depends. There is the temptation of passive nihilism, taking refuge in pessimism and resignation – in a rejection of any hope in the world. The counter-temptation of active nihilism, exemplified by the fiery characters of Dostoevsky, might seem more positive, but seeks to fruitlessly destroy the world rather than prepare the way for anything new. It is, at best, merely transitional. But Nietzsche’s greatest fear is that we will lapse into the state of being of the last human [letze Mensch] – a banal, low-intensity hedonism, a self-satisfied happiness that is the consolation of those whose passions no longer struggle.

My teens see the last humans all about them, in their snacking and surfing peers in the sixth-form common room and in their parents, busy commuting to and from the offices of the Thames Valley ‘knowledge spine’. They themselves move between active and passive nihilism, depending on circumstances. But they sense the danger of making the suburban adjustment and giving way to low-intensity contentment. It is my Nietzsche who makes them realise what they half-know: that music-making opens them to intensities which suburban life cannot manage into quiescence. Music has, all along, loved for them and hated for them, desired for them and yearned for them. They’ve talked music for years. But music-making provides my characters with the goal they lacked, helping them to coordinate their passions and reshape their affective lives. Their band, with Nietzsche at the helm, allows them to become conduits of larger, trans-suburban forces. This is how they might overcome nihilism.

*

Before Nietzsche joins them, the band’s music is a muddle. We see them trying out a variety of different kinds of music, including doom or stoner metal and dub, but it all seems culturally exhausted; it’s all been done before. They lack the capacity to believe in themselves as musicians – and to believe in that they can create anything new. But when Nietzsche takes up his role as their a singer, they feel their way into an open-ended, improvisational music practice.

What do they sound like? They’re a five piece: Chandra plays guitar, Paula, bass, Merv plays marimba – an unlikely instrument for their combo – and Bill comes to play drums. Art, in whose bedroom they rehearse, produces them and adds effects – his role is similar to the ‘non-musician’ Brian Eno in Roxy Music and elsewhere, modifying the sound of musical instruments through technological treatments.

Initially, the band play a kind of doom metal, drawing on the slower, sludgier elements of Black Sabbath’s first six albums (1970-76). Doom is introverted, characteristically melancholy, emphasising sub-frequencies and minor key melodies, with lyrics focused on melancholy, madness and the occult. It is characterised by heavily distorted, lengthily sustained guitar chords and slow-building monolithic riffs, giving the music a ritualistic, hypnotic feel. My teens also show an interest in so-called ambient metal, an offshoot of doom, exemplified by Earth’s Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Edition (1993), a minimalist, beatless album of drone and feedback, entirely lacking vocals or verse/ chorus structure. Ambient metal reflects the influence of American minimalist composers like La Monte Young and Terry Riley just as much as Black Sabbath who make use of repetition and circular structures, producing pieces of long duration and little melodic progression foregrounding drone. My teens also admire a related American composer, Pauline Oliveros, who works directly with drones, encouraging ‘deep listening’, focusing on microscopic subtleties in sound.

My teens are also interested in beat-driven music, too. They try their hand at dub reggae, which, similar to doom and ambient metal, is immersive and bass-driven, focusing on texture and timbre. Dub is a producer’s or engineer’s genre working with completed songs, largely erasing the original vocal track and other instrumentation, leaving a raw rhythm track, over which extra sound effects might be added, filtered through reverb and echo units. It characteristically has a broken, unfinished feel, with disorientating, thickly textured shards of sound floating above an elemental, throbbing bass pattern and with fragments of lyrics evoking biblical apocalypse and Rastafarian belief. Paula, the bassist, finds herself reverting to classic reggae basslines when she tries to play something new. Art, for his part, shows an interest in dub production techniques, even attempting to recreate Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry’s famous Black Ark studio in his bedroom.

The band move on from doom and dub (and their unlikely-sounding hybrid of the two) towards an expansive and weightless kind of ‘kosmiche music’, the open-ended improvisational music of Can and other West German bands of the early 1970s, which broke away from the song structures and the blues scale, drawing on electronic music and avant-garde composition, making use of synthesizers and tape-music techniques. Kosmiche bands worked with drawn out structures without the theatricality and bombast of contemporaneous progressive rock, their musical collages often anchored by hypnotic, forward-flowing rhythms – the famous minimalist, syncopation-free ‘motorik’ beat first heard on Can’s ‘Mother Sky’ (from Soundtracks, 1970) and on the first, eponymous, Neu! album (1972). But it is the hazy, spaced-out soundscapes of Can’s Future Days (1973) that seem to most strongly influence my teens, with its scratchy, funky guitar, oceanic synthesizer, its lilting, intricate rhythms and buried, whispery vocals. The music of Nietzsche and the Burbs, the band, is characterised by the same serene tranquillity, the same egoless, ensemble playing, with its balmy inventiveness, its currents of warmth.

Finally, just before the gig, their sound echoes Miles Davis’s jazz-fusion band of the mid ‘70s as recorded on the 1975 albums Agharta and Pangea, which mixes free and modal jazz with psychedelic rock and rhythm and blues. Vamps and themes rest upon the polyrhythmic complexity of the rhythm section, a constantly evolving muscular groove. Much heavier, denser and unrelenting than Can’s Future Days, the music seethes and boils relentlessly, opening periodically into sonic equivalents of vistas — into unmetered flux.

*

What do these kinds of music have in common? They all come from, or are rooted in, the countercultural explosion of the ‘60s, when music had an ability to define a time, playing a leading role in communal revolution. ‘60s music – psychedelia, free jazz, reggae – had a utopian edge, part of a quest for new forms of social organisation – be it the commune (psychedelic rock) or the ‘repatrination’ to Ethiopia (reggae). Music-making in this period revived the old dialectic between bohemian creativity and bourgeois existence – between the struggle for a meaningful rather than comfortable life. Heightened experience was opposed to settled conformism; immediate gratification and expressive intensity to mundane self-preservation; and abandonment and exuberance to the flabbiness of middle class life. If, later on, the counter-culture came to collapse into narcissistic individualism and consumerism; if music no longer played a leading role in culture at large, its power of general transfiguration having withered, it continued to inform the imaginary of the strands of musical practice my teens admire.

What of the qualities of the music itself? Common to doom, dub and Miles Davis’s jazz-fusion is the use of pulsing, droning rhythms and the foregrounding of songscapes over songs. They depend on improvisation, often making use of mixing desk and studio manipulation. Textural layering is crucial – an interweaving of instruments over the bottom end of bass and drums have a central role. These genuinely collective, non-hierarchical qualities are present in the music of my teens. But I would like to emphasise something else, too. At each one of their practices, the band seem to recreate their music – to transform their repertoire of songs. Each time, they seem to draw from an inexhaustible origin, an Ursprung that springs forth dynamically in their music on that day. In the historical Nietzsche’s terms, we might understand them as drawing on a well of chaos, of the will to power that lies beyond the suburban horizon. It is this welter of forces they’re able to engage through their doom- dub- drone- fusion-influenced music.

What does my Nietzsche add to this music? At first, only a whispering speech-singing, close to a murmur, drifting in and out of silence, recalling Damo Suzuki’s vocals on Future Days, which are like a mist, a spray, another element of the shimmering texture of the music. There’s also Jandek’s Glasgow Monday, which features tremulous speech-song over piano and percussion. Nietzsche’s vocals are only part of a tapestry of sound; they are but an element of the music. But Nietzsche’s speech-singing gains strength, his lyrics become more intelligible, and it seems at their gig that he really might sing for the first time. His presence – if not yet leadership – gives the band direction. Doubts about their musical direction cease; improvisatory songscapes become songs and, for all their carping, all their supposed despair, my teens come to experience music-making as a joyful, affirmatory practice.

*

Chandra, my narrator, hopes that he and his friends might redeem their suburban lives by performing and recording their music, making sense of everything that has happened to them. Their creativity affirms its own conditions – the fact that my teens were born and brought up in the suburbs of Wokingham. Music-making would allow my teens to lift every ephemeral moment of their lives out of irrelevancy and contingency by establishing its absolute importance to their creative practice. Everything that’s happened to them would now be a necessary condition of their music-making and is thereby affirmed by it.

For this reason, according to Chandra, their hometown wouldn’t be just another knot in the great sprawl of the suburbs of southeast England, but the origin of this transformative music, indeed its only possible origin, which would make it a place of pilgrimage for their admirers. What would these admirers see? A town like any other, just the same as any other, but also a town that is unlike any other because it was the condition for the music of Nietzsche and the Burbs. And maybe these pilgrims could go back to their own suburban towns and make affirmatory, transfiguring music of their own.

As such, my characters dream of collective amor fati, a love of fate that would show their audience a way of affirming the suburban hand they were dealt. This would free them from the spirit of hatred and revenge of the active nihilist, since they could thereby overcome the resentment of being born and brought up in such an insignificant, philistine place.

The historical Nietzsche would reject understanding amor fati on a model of subjective volition. The philosopher challenged the notion of individual agency, seeing the individual will as a metaphysical fiction. Although we experience ourselves as causal agents, able to effect changes in the world, the autonomous, self-regulating subject is a myth. On the historical Nietzsche’s account, the real agent of our willing is the will to power, understood as multiplicity, as a field of power differences and relations, in all its indifference and amorality. This is also case for the suburban life that my characters would affirm, since the suburbs, too, are only ultimately a moment of the will to power. In the case of both self and suburbs, the will to power is causally and ontologically primary – it cannot be contained or channelled by any particular form. Indeed, the very creativity of the will to power always involves moments of destruction, of active nihilism, as it overcomes its current ordering.

This is why my teens can seek a new psychic ordering and way of life through music. By engaging with the elemental strife of the will to power, the band’s music would allow them to order their passions, and harmonise their experience – and to do the same for their audience. Granted, such a harmonizing can never be definitive – it can never happen once and for all. There will be need for more creative destruction, for more overcoming. But their amor fati might permit, for a time, a collective power of affirmation that reshapes the system of instincts of its makers and listeners, recreating the suburbs.

*

But we need to go further still to understand what the teens seek with their music. How is it actually supposed to overcome nihilism?

For the historical Nietzsche, the ultimate test on which amor fati depends is, paradoxically, to will the world exactly as it is – to desire that everything that led up to this moment to return over and again. This is his famous notion of the eternal return.

The question that faces my characters is whether they can affirm their suburban lives with its last humans, its banality, as well as its cruelties. To really love their suburban fate means envisaging enduring it countless times. Wouldn’t this lead directly to madness, as their Thomas-Bernhard-reading teacher argues? This depends on the interpretation of Nietzsche’s doctrine. Like any other entity, according to the historical Nietzsche’s ontology, the suburbs are a changing amalgam of forces rather than a fixed, unitary thing. To desire the eternal return of the suburbs means to affirm those energies as movements of becoming, which may in turn be productive of new ways of living.

Towards the end of the novel, my teens declare themselves ready to ‘play the suburban eternity’ – to play this particular traffic jam as every traffic jam, this particular roadworks as every roadworks, this particular town as it echoes with every other town. The band plays the suburban condition in its banality and nullity, as one element of their music harmony. But they give voice to something else: the flux and becoming of which the suburbs are but a transitional formation. The band’s music would bring together both the banality of suburbs and, in productive tension with it, the exuberance of volatile, mobile energies.

How is this act of musical harmony possible?

*

For the historical Nietzsche, the strength to will the eternal return is available only to the overhuman [Übermensch]. This kind of human life wants nothing more than to overcome its present form, rejecting any accommodation with prevailing notions of happiness. The overhuman is devoted to the art of transfiguration, seeking to redeem life through creative action, opening a future beyond the monotonous rhythms of the present. As such, the overhuman cannot think of itself as an end point, as a final evolutionary stage, in the manner of the last human. The ‘over’ in overhuman should be understood in terms of a continual desire for overcoming, of a thirst for physiological, cultural and spiritual metamorphosis. The overhuman is not interested in self-preservation, in what is usually called health (including mental health) or happiness. In this way, the overhuman is aligned most closely with the will to power, expressing and discharging overfulness.

What are the conditions for the appearance of the overhuman? The historical Nietzsche sometimes suggests that the overhuman will require generations of training – of ‘breeding’ – to appear. My characters, by contrast, seem to believe they can become the overhuman at one stroke, through a titanic act of affirmation. Their dream is that their performance, fronted by Nietzsche, would allow them to create themselves and to overcome suburban nihilism.

But this collective affirmation depends on their mentally fragile frontman, which, as it turns out, is too much to ask of him. The band look to Nietzsche to lead their attempt to affirm the chaos from which the suburbs were shaped and into which they will return. Nietzsche is enable them to welcome and endure the test of eternal recurrence, allowing the band a taste of overhuman existence.

What should have happened: Nietzsche’s song. Nietzsche’s singing.

What should have happened: Nietzsche, really singing for the first time. Nietzsche, gone all melodic, for the first time.

What should have happened: Nietzsche, letting his body resound, the whole animal. Nietzsche’s voice, from his deep body. Nietzsche’s voice, deeper than thought, deeper than philosophy.

What should have happened: Nietzsche’s body singing, not his mind. Nietzsche’s body reverberating. Nothing showy, or histrionic. Just Nietzsche, using his lungs, his larynx, his vocal cords. Just Nietzsche, letting his voice resound.

What should have happened: Nietzsche’s singing, gathering intensity. Becoming richer, darker. Nietzsche’s singing, projected on the out-breath, coming from the core.

What should have happened: Nietzsche, singing joy and mourning, both at once. Nietzsche, singing pain and dissolution, both at once. Nietzsche, singing death and rebirth, both at once. Nietzsche, singing fullness and loss, both at once. Nietzsche, singing gathering and dispersal, both at once. Nietzsche, singing tragedy and comedy, both at once.

What happens instead? The task is too great. Nietzsche tries to sing, tries to bind chaos into the structure of a song, thereby recreating the suburbs for his band and audience, but his effort fails.

What really happened: Scattered words, scattered speech-song.

What really happened: Nietzsche, stumbling, staggering.

What really happened: Unearthly screaming – from his throat. A quavering. A buzzing – from his throat. Nietzsche, fitting. Nietzsche, thrashing.

What really happened: Nietzsche hit his head so hard. Nietzsche’s lips were blue. Nietzsche’s eyes were completely rolled back in his head.

What really happened: Suffering – just that. Pain – just that. Madness – just that.

What really happened: Bar-staff standing around us. Calling an ambulance.

Nietzsche loses his mind. He ends up in the locked ward of a mental hospital. A disaster, then – a failure of a gig, a failure of music-making, to overcome the suburban form.[i]

*

But where Nietzsche and the Burbs, the band, failed, Nietzsche and the Burbs, the book, might be understood to succeed.

The novel itself is ostensibly autobiographical, telling the story of how Chandra, its narrator, together with his friends, sought to transfigure the suburbs, rank-ordering their passions through music-making. As we have seen, my teens sought to affirm the conditions of their creativity, redeeming their suburban lives in musical performance and recording. Could we understand Chandra’s memoir as doing something similar in another medium? Of course, the memoir is not itself a musical work. Nietzsche warns us that words are always falsifications of becoming – a problem that is even worse when they are subordinated to logic. But Nietzsche himself wrote prose – and very musical prose at that, making use of such musical devices as symmetry, crescendo, inflection, tone, and tempo to express and affect the body. It is by placing emphasis on the musicality of his prose that Nietzsche resists the traditional philosophical view that our affects, our passions need to be brought into line with our intellect. An appropriately musical prose, his example suggests, can access, evoke and communicate the clash of drives and impulses at work in our affective lives in a manner that parallels that of music.

Is something similarly musical at work in Nietzsche and the Burbs? The novel is unsparing in its accounts of suburban mundanity – the dreariness of sixth-form and family life; it is full of bathetic detail and the bored talk of adolescents. But on the other, it is, as many reviewers have noted, notably musical in its style, not least in the way it evokes the music of the band. There is its rhythmic flow, with frequent use of trance-like repetition with variation at the level of phrases, sentences and paragraphs in a manner that can sometimes recall Thomas Bernhard. There is very frequent use of anaphora, with the repetition of a phrase at the beginning of successive clauses (‘what should have happened …’; ‘what really happened …’); as well as epistrophe, with the repetition of a phrase at the end of successive clauses. Throughout, the use of clipped sentence fragments (recalling Louis-Ferdinand Céline and William S. Burroughs) gives the prose liquidity, a rapid flow, and there are frequent meter-accentuating italics. Perhaps such a musical prose style might be understood to all the play of wilder, chaotic forces at play in the suburbs in the manner of the band whose music its describes. 

*

But exactly how does it do so? Recent commentators have shown how Nietzsche’s own philosophical autobiography, Ecce Homo, sees him make use of the sonata form in order to recount his formation. He uses an overall pattern of exposition, development and recapitulation, thereby moving from dissonance and contradiction to consonance and harmony. This allows him to present the way in which his psychic order developed such that he could become the philosopher of eternal recurrence. Now Chandra’s memoir can also be understood to trace and perform a process of formation – an education of the passions that brought him and his friends to the brink of amor fati. It documents the results of musical discipline – the deliberate shaping of affective life that allowed the band to creatively engage with chaos, even as it led to their lead singer’s collapse. If Chandra were deliberately following Ecce Homo, then his memoir must likewise show a linear movement towards harmony, evidencing the musical shaping of his affective life. Is this in fact the case?

Rereading the novel, it seems that Chandra’s account of my teens’ experience seems more episodic than that. Nights of ecstasy fall back into days of boredom. Their rapture does not last; nihilism has to be overcome over and again. Nietzsche and the Burbs lacks the linearity, the telos of the sonata-form. How, then, should we understand its structure?

*

E.M. Cioran says in an interview that he finds the tone of Nietzsche’s letters completely different to that of his philosophical work. ‘When one reads the letters he wrote at the same time, one sees that he’s lamentable, it’s very touching, like a character out of Chekhov’. The historical Nietzsche may be lost in the thought of the will to power, but he’s also a ‘pitiful invalid’. His faith in his work is intermittent; he’s more vulnerable, he feels crushed by the world.

My teen characters might likewise be understood to be caught between rapture and the mundane. They can touch overhuman existence for a night, but they’ll wake into the world of last humans. They can try to affirm the will to power at play in the banality of the suburbs, but that same banality is their ineluctable horizon. My characters can get drunk enough, high enough, or wild enough with rhetoric to hold out for the musical transfiguration of the world, but they’re doomed to wake up from their dreams, even if, soon enough, they’ll start dreaming again. Suburban banality is not the last word, but nor is ecstasy; the life of my characters shuttles between the two.

Are we to understand the music of the novel in terms of this circular shuttling, this neither … nor, or is something else is going on?

*

The teens of my novel take great joy in dialogue – in the inexhaustible roundelay in which they share their so-called misery. They delight in not simply addressing their concerns to their friends and hearing them echoed back, but in collectively amplifying their discontent, letting it run wild. Much of the novel takes the form of a ‘choral speaking’, in which my teens echo one another, reaffirming and intensifying what they hear. Often, they combine their voices into the first person plural, leading to Bernhard-style hyperbolic build, to rising runs analogous to the arpeggiated flights of a jazz saxophonist. There are accelerations of tempo and the frequent use of exclamation points. Sure, there are italicised slow-downs, too – suspensions, especially in Nietzsche’s blog entries, which seem stoned, slurred, in dub. But the key to the musical structure of novel may be understood to lie in the talkative friendship of my teens – in the vibrant to-and-fro of their conversation.

As we have seen, Chandra, in his memoir wants to affirm the conditions of the music-making of his band – the way it allows my teens to engage with chaotic forces, giving them form. I want to suggest that the possibility of such engagement is first glimpsed in their dialogue, which is rooted in friendship. It is because my characters share an intimacy, a bond of trust sealed by a sense of what is important and unimportant, by what is worth taking seriously and worth deriding, by what is loveable and what is hateable, that they do more than what they accuse their peers, the last humans of doing: distorting and indeed hollowing out the meaning of words. For me, the creative practice of my teens is to be found not simply in their music, but in the exchanges Chandra records. Dialogue can become musical, accessing, evoking and communicating affective life insofar as it attests to what, for my teens, is genuine, truthful communication.

*

In his diaries, Franz Kafka reflects on the ‘merciful surplus of strength [Überschuß der Kräft]’ that allows him, seemingly miraculously, to write of his unhappiness in the midst of his despair – to ‘ring simple, or contrapuntal or a whole orchestration of changes on my theme’.[ii] Kafka doesn’t know where this surprising strength comes from, but it is the source of his writing, its Ursprung. Something similar could be said about my character’s ability to speak. They’re ostensibly unhappy, frustrated and bored by the suburbs; their futures seem bleak; they fear climatic collapse and economic ruination, and yet they’re always able to share their unhappiness with their friends – more, they are even able to ring changes on it, hyperbolising it, giving themselves over to collective rants. As Edgar says in King Lear, ‘The worst is not, so long as we can say, "This is the worst"’’; this capacity to speak, to respond to likeminded others, lightens the doomiest mood.

Such a capacity for dialogue belies the reported banality and dreariness of my teens’ suburban experience. They might feel managed, processed and homogenised, they are nevertheless able to give voice to this feeling, to share it and thereby triumph over it. They might feel overwhelmed by suburban meaninglessness, but they can communicate perfectly meaningfully. In this way, nihilism is overcome through the ‘merciful surplus of strength’ to which Chandra attests, even prior to their musical project.

How should we understand, then, the overall structure of Nietzsche and the  Burbs, understood as Chandra’s memoir? How does it help him accomplish the transfiguration that was also the aim of the band? It is not written in a linear, sonata form – but nor is written as a circular shuttling between lows and highs. For the teens’ lows are shared in inventive and lively conversation; hatred and despair are thereby lightened. The letter of what my teens say is born by a vibrant, even affirmative spirit: the spirit of their friendship as it allows them to share and amplify a perception of the world.

My Nietzsche reprimands his bandmates for talking of their misery too lightly. But such lightening is unavoidable for my teens it depends upon the ‘merciful surplus of strength’ that animates their exchanges. Nietzsche’s quietness and isolation means he’s never part of the roundelay of my character’s chatter. Indeed, this is one of the things that contributes to his madness. When he finds a companion, Lou, with whom he can talk, she leaves him. For Chandra, Nietzsche’s insanity results from the raw chaos of the will to power to which he is exposed when he tries to sing at the gig. But it is just as plausible to attribute it to Lou’s breaking up with him, which makes him into a ‘pitiful invalid’ who can no longer share and thereby lighten his misery.

*

The celebration of friendship might not have been Chandra’s explicit aim in writing his book, but it’s omnipresent. As I have suggested, it is in the teens' dialogue that we can find the amor fati that they seek by way of their music-making. Their dialogue already allows for a quasi-musical ‘composition’ of chaos; it is a way of shaping a communal horizon that makes their lives liveable.

Perhaps this is why Art was quite right to suggest the morning after the gig that ‘the band was the obstacle. Nietzsche was the obstacle’’, and Chandra was similarly correct to quote in response the historical Nietzsche’s fictional character Zarathustra, when he turns to his admirers and says: ‘You had not yet sought yourselves; and you found me. Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves’. In the final scene of the novel, the teens find themselves by going beyond music-making to life-making by deciding to live communally. Nietzsche’s passage through their lives was the occasion for their laying claim to the ‘merciful surplus of strength’ that always and already protected them from suburban nihilism.

And this, indeed, is how I look back on my own suburban life as a teen in the suburbs of Wokingham. The suburbs came alive when my friends and I could share our discontent – when we could ring changes on our boredom. That, for me, is where the transfiguration of the suburbs occurred: where nihilism was overcome if not once and for all then at least temporarily – for a wild evening, for a laughing afternoon. Writing the novel, I wanted to remember the creativity of such exchanges, when we were otherwise pressed up against the dreariness of sixth-form life and the stress of our impending exams; I wanted to affirm the capacity to improvise on the theme of suburban banality.

My characters are always ready for hyperbole – for some grand pronouncement about the end of all things, or some fiery new revelation of hope, thereby whipping up ennui into rapture. They’re ready for humour, too – for laughing at the absurdity and imposture they see around them. And it is this desire to communicate, speaking and laughing with others, that is the clue, I think, to understanding how the form of Nietzsche and the Burbs – its overall musicality – constitutes my own act of amor fati, a way of affirming my own formative years in the suburbs. Its musical features – trance-like rhythms, moments of accelerating hyperbole, dialogue-roundelays – attest to the friendships that were the condition of my transfiguration of the suburbs, allowing me to engage with intensities beyond their suburban ordering.

[This essay is based on a talk I gave at Queen Marys College back in Autumn 2020)

[i] But is it a failure? In his generous reading of my novel, Rüdiger Gürner suggests my Nietzsche is lost in rapture rather than chaos; that he hears an Übermusik in his rapture, a music intended only for the hearing of the Übermensch – a music beyond music, beyond dissonance and consonance, a music beyond madness … (Gedankenklänge – oder: Tanz der Denkschritte: Nietzsche und die Musikalisierung der Reflexion‘, unpublished paper, 2020.) Perhaps; but this is not something our narrator tells us.

[ii] Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1914-1923, translated by Martin Greenberg (New York: Schocken Books, 1948), 183-184

Swedish critic Gunnar Bergdahl makes clear the cohesion between the films, the silence, the director, and the nation in a 1990 interview with Kaurismäki. ‘Should we see Ariel as a depiction of Finnish reality?’ asks the journalist. ‘I take out a cigarette. I light it. Then the police arrive, and it’s over. That’s why I keep making my films shorter and shorter. Do you understand what I mean?’ replies Kaurismäki. Here Kaurismäki advocates narrative and visual concision; by showing very little, and including little dialogue, one empowers the spectator to read the film’s omissions and silences. Yet he also implies that the concision comes from a national mentality premised on the notion that verbal expression is a relatively weak form of social interaction, and moreover one ill-suited to social struggle, such as when the police arrive.

Kaurismäki’s humour – except for the surreal farce of the Leningrad Cowboys – is characteristically deadpan in the extreme … a humour that is so acute and economic that laughter seems a superfluous extravagance. As a result, many have walked out of his films uncertain whether they have seen a comedy at all … His detractors may think he’s a joke, but then so do his fans – they feel he’s the best joke the art cinema has to offer at its own expense. These films are jokes about the seriousness of the art-house tradition by a man who reveres Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer and Yasujiro Ozu; and jokes about the stereotype of the national character by a man who has made a career out of presenting himself as a the gloomiest of Finns (his own lead actors excepted) who ever stared into a glass of Koskenkorva, the national tipple

Jonathan Romney

More crucially, now gone in L’argent is the psychological interiority that marked Bresson heroes like the country priest (Claude Laydu), or Fontaine (François Leterrier) chipping away alone in his cell in A Man Escaped. This is not simply a matter of Bresson progressively abandoning, over the course of his career, the device of a “thought track,” voice-over narration. Something colder and more despairing has occurred: it is not the case that Bresson denies us access to the “inside” of his characters, but rather that there is no longer any “deep” mind, heart, or soul to access. There is only a sometimes unpredictable mix of animal impulses and reactive behaviors, aggressive outbursts and defensive mechanisms.

Yvon, in a sense, “follows the money” all the way to the end, enslaved to its avaricious logic. Yet his ultimate question to his kindly benefactor—“Where’s the money?”—is (as Arnaud points out) almost the rhetorical riddle of a sphinx: it requires no real, practical answer. Yvon goes through the motions of theft and killing, but they are meaningless even to him at this point; there is no desired outcome or goal involved. Survival, revenge, redemption—these motives meant a lot to Tolstoy in his time, but they don’t count for much anymore in the completely dehuman­ized, alienated, anonymous world that Bresson captures here.

from L'argent: the Weight of the World, by Adrian Martin

Out in a year or so from Melville House, my new novel, Simone Weil. 

I am teaching an online seminar with the European Graduate School on Auguat 13th, 14th, 20th, 21st, 27th and  28th. Title: Creative Writing in the End Times: Working With Apocalypse.

Alongside Bob Dylan, Fred Neil and a local folk singer called Bob Gibson, Callier was discovering John Coltrane, who had just released his free jazz album A Love Supreme. "He was playing at a little club called McKees, and I got there early to see Elvin Jones nailing his drum kit to the floor. Then the quartet rocks on stage, and I wasn't prepared for the intensity with which these guys threw themselves into the music – I had never seen men do that before in my life and it frightened me. It made me realise that everything in life was in this music: the beautiful and the ugly, the godly and ungodly. Not everybody wants to touch those places because there are things we have to forget in order to live with ourselves, and that music didn't let you have any secrets.

Terry Callier, interviewed

There is no doubt that Jesus was crucified in about the seven hundred and seventieth year after the foundation of Rome; there is no doubt that the Lamb of God is being crucified each day, and will be until the end of the world. Yet it is as if now the crucifixion has at last become fully a historical reality. It is in our day that Jesus is, in the fullest and most radical sense, being rejected by everything – I mean literally everything – and in every area of man’s endeavours: his thinking, his willing, his undertakings, his building of his world, his consumption, etc. It is in our day that Jesus is being, in the fullest and most radical sense, humiliated: simply left aside as possessing no interest or significance in comparison with what man discovers for himself and bestows upon himself. It is in our day that Jesus is, in the fullest and most radical sense, being put to death, since none of his words or actions or miracles have any relevance for Eros-inspired man.

As long as the crucifixion of Jesus was the focus of men’s interests and eyes and thoughts, he was not truly crucified. In our day, the means man has acquired have made him turn his eyes and thoughts and consciousness away from the cross; the cross is good for nothing now but to mark men’s graves. Now Jesus has truly been crucified, in the fullest sense that the word ‘crucifixion’ can have as the sign and symbol of scorn, derision, unimportance, failure, abandonment. But think what this entails. It means that God has been conquered and eliminate from the society to which he once issued his challenge. The cross of Jesus, which was meant to be the sign of God’s unconquerable love, has now become purely and simply the sign of his failure. Eros has triumphed through technical and political advances. God has fallen silent.

The silence is the great silence that the evangelists tell us descended at the moment of the crucifixion and which had such tragic meaning for Jesus. It is the great silence that the Apocalypse tells us fell upon creation as the Lamb broken open the seventh seal. It is the silence of God, who is Word yet has now withdrawn into speechlessness. The God of the Word no longer reveals himself, no longer makes himself heard. We cannot say that the noise of the world and the words exalted by the mass-communications media have drowned out the Word of God. No, it is simply that God no longer speaks.

Here, it sems to me, we have a new challenge issued by God to this world. The man of the modern age wanted to slay the father; now, by eliminating the Son as he has, he has in effect slain the Father. He wanted to substitute his own power for the supposed or revealed power of God. He has worked miracles which seem divine (like the Pharoah’s magicians, who were as powerful as Moses and worked the same miracles as he did: the whole hermeneutical problem was already posed at that moment). He has mastered creation and has no further need of providence. He sees within his grasp the fulfilment of the age-old dreams he used to tell God about in his prayers. He knows there is no need of forgiveness for sin, because sin is just a sickness. He need not look to God for truth, because he has taken the path of ‘research and development’, and this path will lead him to all the answers. Salvation is no longer from the Jews or from God; man saves himself through his sciences and his technical skill.

Indeed, we may ask, what could God still have to say to man? What could he possibly still mean to man? The God who was once revealed in his self-humiliation is still being revealed in his present humiliation, and only in this humiliation! It is nothing but a monstrous show of human pride to extend the humiliation that God deliberately accepted and experienced in Jesus, to all suffering, unfortunate, humiliated, and exploited human beings. The theologians who assert that only in the persons of the por do we encounter Jesus and tat the poor alone are god’s image (the famous ‘horizontal relationship’) are simply theologians of Eros and human pride. They are inspired by the spirit of the world and are contributing to the accomplishment of man’s purpose, which is to strip God of his work and his very identity, to strip him of what he chose to be.

These theologians are today’s chief priests and members of the Sanhedrin who rend their garments at the scandal of Jesus declaring himself God. They are today’s Pharisees, far more so than the priests and pastors of another day with their attachments to institutions, who are now lost in the shadows of a history that is over and done with. By thus stripping God in the realm of theology, these theologians are finishing the work western man has done in other areas. And by so doing, they are effectively humiliating God and crucifying Jesus. Like Jesus before Pilate, God remains silent in the face of the insulting accusation; in what may well be the final combat, God remains silent.

God’s silence means that the world that wanted to be left alone is now indeed alone. It is left to its own dereliction. In writing these words, I am not proposing a hypothesis or a personal interpretation. I am simply repeating what the entire Bible tells us, namely, that God adapts himself to man, walks with man along the paths man chooses, and enters into a relationship with man in which God is the Wholly Other and yet is also inexpressibly close to man.

God’s silence also means that an event has occurred that is of capital importance for the history of the West. If, as I have tried to show, the history of the West is constituted by the tension and conflict between Eros and Agape, between man’s ambition to be completely dominant and the humility of God among us; if this history is the ever renewed result of the reciprocal challenges of man and God; if the meaning of man’s undertaking’s springs precisely from this relationship that was established by the Word of God: then the silence of God entails the disappearance of the very meaning of western history; that history is now annulled and rendered impossible. The paradox that is the West exists no longer.

From now on, all that is left as a drab, insipid unfolding of implications, an interplay of forces and mechanisms. There will be structures and systems, but we shall no longer be able to speak of ‘history’. Man is now seeing the very purpose of his struggling being removed from him, as well as very opportunity for a more intense life; he may continue to ‘fight’, but his fists will encounter only empty air and unbounded darkness. God’s absence means the abandonment of the world, but in this world man will discover that he himself is likewise absent. When the West claims a monopoly of the truth and seeks to proclaim it to others, it will arouse only anger and hatred. The West is dying because it has won out over God.

Jacques Ellul, Betrayal of the West

I see Europe marching with giant steps to its end: not for economic or technical or political reasons, not because it is being overwhelmed by the third world (which is in fact impotent), not because it is also being challenged by China, but simply because it has decided to commit suicide. All the behaviour (and I mean literally all of it) of the technicians, the bureaucrats, the politicians, and, at bottom (despite appearances), the philosophers, the film-makers, and the scientists is suicidal. Everything of a positive character that may be found is immediately turned inside out, distorted, and stood on its head so as to become a new source of accusation or a new means of destruction. The Left has triumphantly joined the Right in this race toward death, while Christianity celebrates its marriage with Marxism and proceeds to slay the old, impotent flesh that was once the glory of the world.

[…] The first movement is that of blind negation, a retreat into unqualified negation of all the West has been and can yet be. Some of its embodiments: the frenzied pleasure in destroying and rejecting, in playing the man without a future or the artist without culture; the sadism of the intellectual who tears language – his own language – to pieces, and who does not want to say anything further, because in fact there is nothing to say; the explosion of words, because there is no more communication; the mockeries that are regarded as work of art; and finally, the suicides, physical among the writers, painters and musicians. All this is happening because these people regard the ‘system’ as utterly frightful, and see it immediately absorbing and rationalising every project whatsoever. They feel caught by an inescapable dilemma, since even their irrationalities serve as compensation for the system and thus become part of it (although it never becomes clear in what precisely the famous ‘system’ consists).

[…] Lacan, Derrida, and all their second-rate imitators who think that absolute incomprehensibility offers a way out, when in fact we have shut the door on all possibilities and hopes, and have sunk into a resignation that knows no future. There is no longer anything to live for: that is what these intellectuals are saying without realizing it; the blinding light they shed is that of a sun on the point of sinking into the sea. Virtuosity has never been a substitute for truth. Withdrawal into curiosity of this kind shows only that for these intellectuals, the last Cardinal Eminences of the western world, there is no longer any such thing as truth.

[…] We are content to die of dancing. Our generation is not even capable of cynicism. It takes a kind of terrible greatness to say, ‘After me, the deluge’. No one says that today; on the contrary, everyone is glutted with promises and regards the mad dance as a way to authentic renewal. Yet there is no goal, nothing transcendent, no value to light the way; the movement is enough.

[…] The intellectuals caught up in this directionless movement take the lids off bottomless wells; they lean over them and fall in.

[…] The nihilistic revolution has succeeded. Today’s political activists who still claim to be revolutionaries have nothing to put in nihilism’s place. Movement for movement’s sake, thorough study for the study’s sake, the revolution for the revolution’s sake: that, they say, is the only way to escape the system. It is a remarkable thing, however, that this system renders mad not only those who are part of it but those who reject it as well. The system is now the God who makes men mad, but it is a God we have created with our own minds.

[…] Yet once we strip away the illusionist’s veil of pseudo-scientific language or the layer of obscurity caused by a fragmented discourse, and look at what our sociologists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, Marxists, historians, novelists, and poets are trying to say, we are appalled at the emptiness, inanity, and incoherence of their thought. We realise that there is only a vast repetitiveness. Everything they say I completely familiar and has long since become commonplace.

[…] Today it is the myths of death, and they alone, that speak to us in our madness. The West is at its end – but that does not necessarily mean the end of the world.

Jacques Ellul, The Betrayal of the West

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