Jean Genet, from various interviews.

I would indeed like to free myself from all conventional morals, those that have hardened and crystallised and that impede growth, that impede life. But an artist is never completely destructive. The very concern with creating a harmonious sentence supposes a morality, that is a relation between the author and a possible reader. I write in order to be read. No one writes for nothing. In every aesthetics there is a morality.

Q.: Did you start writing to escape from solitude? A.: No, because I wrote things that made me even more solitary.

[On The Maids] A critic said that maids ‘don’t speak that way’. They do speak that way, to me, when I’m alone at midnight.

I will hazard an explanation: writing is the last recourse when you have been betrayed. There’s something else I’d like to say to you: I realised very quickly, as young as fourteen or fifteen, that all I could be was a vagabond and a thief, not a good thief, but a thief all the same. I think my only success in the social world was or could have been along the lines of a ticket inspector on a bus, or a butcher’s assistant. And since this kind of success horrified me, I think that I trained myself at a very young age to have emotions that could only lead me in the direction of writing. If writing means experiencing such strong emotions or feelings that your entire life is marked out by them, if they are so strong that only their description, their evocation, or their analysis can really allow you to deal with them, then yes, it was at Mettray, and at fifteen years old, that I began to write.

Writing is perhaps what remains to you when you’ve been driven from the realm of the given world.

E.M. Cioran:

We are increasingly interested not in what an author says but in what he may have meant, not in his actions but in his projects, less in his actual work than in the work he dreamed of. If Mallarmé intrigues us, it is because he fulfills the conditions of the writer who is unrealised in relation to the disproportionate ideal he has assigned himself[….] We are adepts of the work that is aborted, abandoned halfway through, impossible to complete, undermined by its very requirements. The strange thing in this case is that the work was not even begun, for of The Book, that rival of the Universe, there remains virtually no revealing clue; it is doubtful that its structure was outlined in the notes Mallarmé destroyed, those that have survived being unworthy of our attention. Mallarmé: an impulse of thought, a thought that was never actualised, that snagged itself on the potential, on the unreal, disengaged from all actions, superior to all objects, even to all concepts – an expectation of thought.

A little later, Cioran notes that whereas Baudelaire called Poe a ‘hero’ of letters, Mallarmé went further and called him ‘the absolute literary case’, and comments,

No one today would assent to such a judgement, but that is of no consequence, for each individual (like each epoch) possesses reality only by his exaggerations, by his capacity to overestimate – by his gods.

Singing’s always hard for me. Not physically. But to get it neutral, where it’s not too emotional and not too deadpan. Somewhere in between is what I’m looking for. It drives me crazy sometimes. In this case, I think it’s a little better than some of the shots I’ve had at it.

Scott Walker

Milan Kundera musing on Don Quixote:

Poor Alonzo Quijada meant to elevate himself into the legendary figure of a knight-errant. Instead, for all of literary history, Cervantes succeeded in doing just the opposite: he cast a legendary figure down: into the world of prose. ‘Prose’: the word signifies not only a nonversified language; it also signifies the concrete, everyday, corporeal nature of life. So to say that the novel is the art of prose is not to state the obvious; the word defines the deep sense of that art.

A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world. Cervantes sent Don Quixote jounreying and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the knight errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose.

Once again I want to call up the figure of Alfonzo Quijada; see him mount his Rosinante and set off in search of great battles. He is prepared to sacrifice his life for a noble cause, but tragedy doesn’t want him. For, since its birth, the novel is suspicious of traegedy: of its cult of gandeur; of its threatrical origins; of its blindness to the prose of life. Poor Alonzo Quijada. In the vicinity of his mournful countenance, everything turns into comedy.

… novelistic thinking, as Broch and Musil brought it into the aesthetic of the modern novel, has nothing to do with the thinking of a scientist or a philosopher; I would even say it is purposely a-philosophic, even anti-philosophic, that is to say fiercy independent of any system of preconceived ideas; it does not judged; it does not proclaim truths; it questions, it marvels, it plumbs; its form is highly diverse: metaphoric, ironic, hypothetic, hyperbolic, aphoristic, droll, provocative, fanciful; and mainly it never leaves the magic circle of its characters’ lives; those lives feed and justify it.

With a terseness corresponding to his stark musical style, he also insists that his songwriting is ‘an attempt to say something completely ordinary. Those are the memorable things.’

from an old interview in The Guardian with Bill Callahan

Canada

W. thinks constantly of Canada. It’s his new line of flight, he admits, to get to Canada. Since I haven’t had any lines of flight for a while, it’s his turn, he says, and getting to Canada, with its pristine blue lakes and bear-filled wilderness is his line of flight. Of course, W. is Canadian, and his Canada is not a fantasy. It’s based on his own childhood by the great blue lakes and on the edge of the wilderness, and alongside the open-hearted Canadians.

We had a big house, he remembers, and went swimming every day. We were happier then. Sometimes he shows me pictures: a happy family, by a big house, with pine trees behind, and a big blue lake to swim in. And who are those people, I ask him? Canadians, says W., open-hearted Canadians.

Moving back to England was the disaster, says W. Wolverhampton of all places! England’s bad enough, but Wolverhampton! He shows me pictures of himself in school uniform. It had all gone wrong by then, says W., can’t you see it in my eyes? I can see it. Ever since then, says W., he’s dreamt of getting back to Canada.

It’s not impossible, he says. His sister’s made it. She’s a Canadian now. Or perhaps it’s impossible for him, he says, and for the likes of us. It would be impossible for you in particular, he tells me. The Canadians wouldn’t put up with you for a moment. Canada! It’s a big country, unlike England, says W. And cheap, too – he was there a couple of years ago on holiday, and was amazed. It’s cheap, and the people are open-hearted. Not like the English, he says.

Feral children rap on his windows as we talk. What do they want?, I ask him. He’s got no idea. Close the shutters!, he says, and we sit in darkness with our gin. Are there feral children in Canada?, I ask W. He thinks not. It has a good social security system, he says, and an egalitarian attitude. They pay well, too. Salaries are high. Canadians enjoy a high standard of living, with their blue, pure lakes and the great tracts of wilderness.

Would the cold bother him?, I ask W, who always moans he’s cold. It’s not wet cold like over here, says W. It’s dry cold, completely different. It doesn’t feel anything like as bad. And it’s not as depressing. You don’t get wave after wave of Westerlies coming in from the Atlantic. In England, we’re battered by Westerlies, says W., but in Canada, the weather is as pure and simple as the lakes and the open-hearted people.

What about the bears – wouldn’t they frighten him?, I ask W., who is not a brave man. They are ways of dealing with bears, W. assures me. The Canadians issue pamphlets on the matter. They probably keep things in the back of their cars to alarm them. Bear-frighening devices. Wouldn’t he have to learn to drive in Canada?, I ask W. It’s a big country after all, and there are miles of wilderness to negotiate. W. admits he might have to. He’d take lessons, he says. That would be part of his new life.

And what if he broke down?, I ask W. He’d have to learn some basic car maintenance, W. admits, for the Canadian wilderness. But he’s practical, he says, and would pick it up quickly, not like me. You wouldn’t last a minute in Canada, he says.

Inanity

I am an expert at inanity, everyone knows that. It’s my great talent, says W., to be able to generate nonsense and to do so with others. Hours can pass, days, and there’s still more inanity to be tapped. How is it possible?, asks W. How do you do it? Whenever he’s in my company, says W., he longs for nothing other than to read Spinoza. Spinoza, he says, is your opposite. He longs for nothing else than to pore over Spinoza. All the answers are there he says.

Inanity – how do we do it?, W. wonders. For W. has a part in it too. W. is also an expert inanist. We ask each other questions, ‘Would you call yourself a corruptible man?’, or ‘Do you consider yourself to be a man of emotion?’ which permit of infinite permutations and infinitely stupid answers. W. is a great expert at question asking. When there’s silence for a moment, W. is ready with a question. I admit it, I’ve learned from him the great art of arbitrary question asking.

W.’s questions often have a melancholic tinge. ‘What do you consider your greatest failure?’; ‘When you look back over your life, how do you excuse it?’; ‘Why do you think things turned out so badly for you?’; ‘Do you think you will ever come up with a single idea?’; ‘What do you regret most about your life?’: these are all classic W. questions, which begin with a presumption of a failure that is utter and complete.

‘That’s what draws us together’, says W., ‘our sense of having failed’. I always tell him that I lack such a sense, and that things have turned out quite well, considering. I tell him his love of failure is a nostalgia for success. ‘In your heart, you measure yourself against success’. I tell him I recognise no such idols. ‘We were doomed from the start, everyone’s doomed …’

We’re on the North Devon coast, in Minehead, looking for cider. You’d think you could find it here, this is Somerset. A morning cider! Bright and glinting in our pint glasses! It’s a bright, warm day and we are after nothing other than cider, Somerset cider, though there’s none to be found. So we climb the hill instead, to enjoy the views. Up we go, our chatter filling the morning air.

We’re on particularly good form. Chatter pours forth in joyous profusion. Have we ever been happier? Have we ever achieved such inanity? Secretly, we both know we’ve reached our high point. It must be the morning air, the brightness, the sunlight on the waves below. There’s no cider in us, no alcohol, but it must be the air growing thinner as we climb. We feel purified. Light pours down upon us. We twitter like birds. We laugh and twitter.

How funny we are! But to none but ourselves. How inane! But who would appreciate it but us? At the summit of the hill, we can see the town spreading out on one side of us, and the sea on the other in the morning brightness. This is it, we’ve done it: it’s our ascent into the thinnest, most rarefied of inanities. But who would know it but us? Who would appreciate us but us?

Rivers

W. and I are celebrants of rivers, and always feel the need to hail them. ‘The mighty Tyne!’, W. might say, and I might say ‘the mighty Plym!’ The sight of a river is always an occasion. So, of course, is the sea. ‘It’s the ozone’, says W. ‘it makes you feel good’.

It does, and the view of the sheet of the sea, just past Exeter. The whole sheet of the sea, viewed from the train, neat Plmouth Gin and ice in our plastic cups. ‘This is happiness’, says W. Of course, they’ll have to reroute the trains soon. They’re electrical and shortcircuit when the surf splashes over them. Sometimes the trains stop for hours, completely shortcircuited. ‘It’s the new trains’, says W., ‘they’re useless’.

W. says he’s felt ill nearly all his adult life. ‘When was the last time you felt well?’, I ask him. He can’t remember. ‘It’s been years’, he says suddenly. ‘Years!’ He used to go for great walks on the moors, he remembers. That’s when he last felt healthy: on his great weekend walks, when he would set off with no end in particular in view. He’d just walk, for miles, across the moors.

There’s nothing better, he says, than to climb up to the moors, and sea the blue strip of the sea in the distance. Are there really big cats up there, panthers and the like?, I ask him. He never saw any, he said. But his moor walks have long since finished. He lacks something, says W. There’s something missing in him. Why doesn’t he go on his great moor walks any more?, he muses, as we look out to sea.

It’s important to hail rivers, we both agree, but just as important to hail the sea, although we do not do so by name. We do not, for instance, hail the sea south of Edinburgh as the North Sea, or the sea south of Exeter as the Atlantic (‘is it the Atlantic?’, I ask W.) A simple, ‘the sea!’ is enough. Just as when we see the edge of the moor on our train journeys in Devon, we say ‘the moor!’

Ah, the moor! W. is feeling regretful again. He looks very young, I tell him, younger than me, even though he’s several years older. His life is full of regret, he says, and gets out his Spinoza. He’s going to read now, he tells me, and I’ll have to entertain myself.

Transcendental Whining

By email, W. tells me I come across as too whiny in the W. posts. ‘It’s better when you make yourself talk, rather than just reacting to me. But of course I am a terrible nag’.

W. remembers that I spoke to him at length about free jazz, commenting on its relationship to free improvisation, and the distrust many Afro-American improvisers have felt towards the rhetoric of depersonalisation taken over from John Cage and post-Cageans. Jazz improvisation is often linked to the idea of telling your own story, of finding your voice, not depersonalisation, I’d said, though perhaps this is not so at odds with post-Cagean discourse on free improvisation as one might think. Perhaps the two could be thought together, I’d said, and tried at some length to outline how.

He’d enjoyed listening to me, W. says; he’d learnt something, and why didn’t I write about that? I like to present myself as a victim, W. observes. It’s one of my key traits. In fact, it is my key trait. I want to think of myself as a victim and then whine about it night and day.

Is W. a victim? No, not really, says W. He doesn’t have the victim mentality that I’ve perfected. ‘You love feeling like a victim. You like nothing better than to be persecuted’. – ‘But you must admit, I’ve been a little persecuted!’ – ‘How?’, says W., ‘give me examples’, and when I do, he says, ‘you’re no more persecuted than I am. You’re not in the least persecuted’.

Why do I like to feel persecuted?, W. muses. It’s because of my general hysteria. ‘You’re an hysteric’, says W., ‘ceaselessly whining’, but he likes me because of this. ‘There’s something magnificent about your whining. Sometimes it reaches a magnificent purity. You attain whining itself, says W., ‘the pure "to whine"’.

W. is a mystic, and I am a whiner, he says. It takes a mystic to discover what is eternal in my whining. ‘It’s magnificent’, he says, ‘go on, do some whining. Whine, fat boy. Tell your story’.

Last year, on the banks of the Dreisam river (‘ah, the mighty Dreisam’), W. held forth at length on finding your own voice. He thinks he might have found his quite recently, he said. He’s noticed quite a change in his writing.

‘And what about you?’, W. reflected. ‘Your voice’, he says to me, ‘is like a transcendental whining’. It’s amazing, he notes, just how much I whine, and how much I give myself to it. ‘It absorbs everything you are’, said W. In many ways, he admires it, said W. He thinks it’s why he’s drawn to me.

Small Men

W. and I are watching the new Scout Niblett video, the one where Will Oldham is dressed as a skeleton. ‘She’s from Nottingham’, says W. proudly. Nottingham! Imagine that! Not so far from here! Will Oldham does a handstand in the video. I’m impressed, and say so. W. likes to watch me watching Will Oldham being physical. ‘You’re impressed by his physicality’, he says, and he’s right.

W. say him Will Oldham  a dance machine at ATP, where you have to put your feet onto these pads that light up in time to the music. ‘He was fantastic’, says W. The next year, he paid for me to do the same. ‘You were useless. You’re not a physical man. That’s why you admire Will Oldham’s physicality, isn’t it?’ I say it is. ‘Of course, Will Oldham’s a surfer’, says W. ‘He’s surprisingly buff. But you’re not buff, are you? Except for your arms. But they’re just grotesquely big’.

W. remarks on how small Will Oldham is. ‘He’s tiny’. So is David Pajo, I say. ‘Oh yes, he’s small’. For his part, W. has always considered himself a small man. Once, our friend X. a nightclub bouncer, picked up W. and twirled him round over his head like a cheerleader’s baton. W. didn’t mind. He always feels safe with X., he says. X. makes him feel secure and safe. We both pause to think about X., whom we haven’t seen for a while. Ah, X.!

Do make him feel safe?, I ask W. ‘No’, he says. ‘Just thin’. W. says I’m, getting fatter. ‘You’re not going to last long’, he says. ‘You haven’t got too many years left. Look at you. When you die, I’m going to be your literary executor. Delete, delete, delete that’s what I’m going to do’.

The Hunger Artist

Kafka’s hunger artist starves because he can find nothing he wants to eat. He starves and that starvation is his art – crowds come to watch him in his cage. Of course, the music of Jandek is the result of a choice: when it comes to the live performances, there is the question of who is going to comprise the group (or whether, indeed, it will number more than one), the length, duration and style of the songs (decided on the day of performance, with a run through of the set with participating musicians, all of whom have a considerable input) and the venue itself (Corwood is very specific with its requests). And of course, with respect to the ‘studio’ albums, there are choices of instrumentation, recording techniques, lyrics and so on – even as there is a large element of improvisation in the performances.

But in another sense, there is no choice when it comes to the performance (and particularly in the studio recordings): at their heart, they have a man in extremity, a man who performs, I think, to give this extremity to song. In live performances, the Representative’s face is blank – not a mask but the absence of masks; a space onto which you can project nothing (what is feeling? what does he see of the audience? what is he thinking?) but also everything, for does not his blankness invite the wildest of speculation.

A blank face – but the gestures of a guitarist, a bassist, a pianist (whatever he is playing) are also present; we can watch the Representative turn to his fellow musicians, watching them; we can watch him shuffle and dip and crouch over his guitar. He is a physical player. But the face, half hidden by a fedora, is blank. Certainly we can watch the words come from his mouth – watch him lean into the microphone, drawling sometimes, stretching a word, but always wanting to be heard, always precise in his vocalising. A blank face – and no stage banter when a guitar string breaks, and he has to wait for three or four long minutes another guitar to be brought from behind stage. No ‘thank you very much’ for listeners who might have travelled halfway round the globe to see him.

What do the audience of Kafka’s hunger artist watch? A man in extremity. A man who starves. What a feat! What endurance! And Jandek’s audience? ‘I come to bring you a bit of depression …’ Watching the live band settling into their groove, interacting but following the lead of the Representative’s vocal, I wonder whether it is really extremity we see there, on the stage. In live performance, the lyrics change: they become more frank, more confessional; some (Manhattan Tuesday) permit of a simple, autobiographical interpretation. Is he a man in extremity or a controlled man, part of a controlled ensemble who somehow seeks to account for himself, to search for himself, and before an audience?

Often he will acknowledge that audience in his lyrics. ‘I don’t know why I’m here/ to sing in front of you’. But it is an acknowledgement of the inadequacy of what they will see. Why is he here? But it should be admitted, too, that we find another lovely kind of extremity in the speech-song of Glasgow Monday, The Cell – a wholly new style of vocalising in Jandek’s oeuvre. A first – a breathy, tentative, suspended speech-song that seeks and searches over the piano – but for what? Some kind of resolution; a provisional answer to the questioning that is his speech-sung voice. And, too, that some performances revel in a muscular thrashing, in power, which has little to do with confession at all.

Perhaps at Jandek’s heart is not always a man who starves. But then, with the solo recordings that follow the acapella period around the turn of the millennium, that starving man is there and he is all there is. A starving man – and who starves because what is good for us (romance and work, ordinary sociability) is what he cannot find a way to want. He falls short of what we take for granted; he searches for what we, his listeners, presume ourselves to have. He is a man in exile, a man in suspense. Life, for him, is some kind of mistake, some aberration. And yet he sings. He starves.

I do not mean to imply that, listening to Jandek we are like the spectators outselves Kafka’s hunger artist’s cage; I don’t think we are the well-fed watchers for whom his starvation is an art we can admire, and for which can be exchanged the panther who takes his place when he eventually expires. I wonder whether we listen from a kind of starvation of our own – from that place in us where we are not in place – where the possibility of life, ordinary life, seems to wear itself away. For the hunger-artist, there is an audience of the hungry. How else could we bear what we heard? How could we want it?

Granted, there are those for whom the oeuvre of Jandek is a kind of stunt. Some, like Irwin Chusid, marvel at it – for all his derision (and Chusid is an articulate and funny man – he’s hilariously derisive) – there is his wonder that there were ever Jandek recordings at all. Why would anyone want to do that?, he asks, over and again. The fact of their existence perturbs him, and he seems to admire what he takes to be a mad tenacity. This is one of the images of Jandek circulated in the media – of an infinitely perverse man, a curiosity, an outsider, a kind of beast.

For their part, Corwood do not admit to being perturbed. Letters from Chusid are met with friendly toleration. I think the early days were so difficult that Chusid’s acknowledgement was already an encouragement sufficient to go on. We find a similar attitude in the filmakers of Jandek on Corwood who admit they were first lured to their subject by his reputation – the ‘myth’ of Jandek, and we a little disappointed, at first by the music. Doesn’t Katy Vine, the journalist who tracked down Sterling Smith in his Houston home admit the same?

For those listeners, there was of course also the record sleeves which, after the live performances, we can be sure depict Smith himself, photographed at various ages and in range of situations, often making use of photograph-altering software. Here, too, we find a kind of blankness – the blank face of Six and Six, which matches so perfectly this hard, affect-less recording (tracks that find their way into an affectless state at the heart of great depressive moods; the still eye of the storm), is defiantly – who? The smiling man in a cardigan in front of a barn is the opposite of the singer/intoner of Worthless Recluse … what speaks by way of the failure of this correlation?

Interpretation breaks down. It runs aground on the record sleeves, which will eventually stop picturing Smith at all. Smith becomes a sufi on two of them. He is outside Mansion House in London, on deserted streets, on another. Each time, with respect to the recordings themselves, there is something missing. Who isn’t tempted to read and reread the covers in search for a clue (what is he carrying on the sleeve of Blue Corpse?)? Something missing – and that it is who sings and plays at the heart of Jandek; it is Smith himself; it is the absence in the space of Smith, who cannot find a way to live.

We should admit the recordings are varied; there is a ludic Jandek – a playful, hilarious one (think, for example, of ‘Mother’s Day Card’, where two voices sing the message on the inside of such a card); a spooky one (the multiple voices of ‘Om’); a meditative one (‘I Sit Alone and Think About You’). for a long time, I think, there were no recordings at all – the acapella recordings seem to come after a break; the voice is deeper.

This becomes especially noticeable on the studio recordings that follow the great I Threw You Away – for my money, the greatest in Jandek’s mighty oeuvre. The Humility of Pain, Khartoum, Raining Down Diamonds … what is being pursued from album to album? My answer, very simple: starvation. The inability to eat, to find a thing to eat. And more intensely than ever; more focusedly than ever.

These recordings, I think, close themselves from Chusid and other, similar listeners – those who are looking for the stunt-Jandek, to confirm or disconfirm the Jandek-myth. How, when you had heard them – really heard them – from your own starvation, could you go out to look for the man who made them. They are forbidding. They push us back, I fancy, as they push Smith back too – doesn’t he wonder at them? Isn’t he amazed, too at what he has made? How not to feel a kind of holy seriousness around these recordings, which hold themselves, with respect to our listening, at their own distance?

I am always moved to read of the quiet reverentness that, for the most part greets Jandek performances (though it is always fun to read of those who call out, welcome to … X, and for Smith himself to – briefly – smile). We know seriousness. We know a kind of sacred – a distance – that surrounds the recordings. I’m sure that Smith feels it too. Sure, that is, that they also push him back from what he has done. What must it be to live at that remove from himself? To honour the recordings that made themselves from singing and playing?

I think this is part of what it means to be a hunger-artist who reaches the hunger-listeners who open their ears inside us. I think it demands a paring away, a blankness. The studio recordings have reached moods more terrifying than anything I have heard. Moods of a desolation so absolute – of a despair so refined that … they escape what I can say of them. How to greet them except by silence? There are few artists whose work I will simply put on and listen to. Few whose work has a drama sufficient to carry that listening, when a hungry man steps forward to listen in my place.

Jandek: hunger artist. Perhaps the distance of the recordings – their rarefaction, their daring – is the double of that which the artist feels towards the world, towards the ordinary possibility of living. He sings in extremity – is it not reasonable to suppose that he lives, too, in extremity? How can he bear what he bears? But he sings, plays and records. He issues LPs. And now, of course, he plays live, too. I think there must be great joy in this. Why not? Hasn’t the hunger artist found something to eat?

The live performances seem different to what has gone before. There’s less distance around them. And, in the performances, less extremity. Is this what has permitted a kind of autobiographical turn in their lyrics? Is it because the presence of other musicians make Jandek something other than a machine that quarries despair? I admit I listen to the live recordings (with the exception of The Cell) with different ears. Or rather, that my ears are not starving; I do not listen from my own extremity. I enjoy the grooves; I laugh sometimes at the bathos of the lyrics (‘Real Wild’); I like the fierce interplay and the surprise of what new collaborators allow. But I listen differently, and from another kind of distance.

December 2007, and it’s a full year since the last studio recording – one of the longest breaks over 30 years of Jandek LPs. I want to hear him starve again. And I want to listen again from where I am starving.

Links to articles on Jandek‘s performances.

Ideas

W. is telling us about ideas. He’s had one idea, which took him 15 years to formulate. 15 years! 

‘How many ideas have you had?’, says W. I tell him I’m not sure. What’s the sign of an idea? ‘They have to be clear and distinct’, says W. ‘Clear and distinct.’

What I want is to be loved, W. has decided. ‘You want to be adored,’ he says. W.’s much less concerned with being adored. ‘That’s why I can have ideas’, he says. He can work in silence for years. He doesn’t need external affirmation. He’s like a mole, he says. Digging, with his little paws working away and the wet soil on his nose.

Sometimes, W. concedes, it’s as if I have ideas. I once spoke to him very movingly about the Phaedrus, for example, and the reason why Socrates has to leave the city to talk to his friend. W. immediately lays claim to any idea I might have in his articles. I would do the same, he says. But of course, my ideas are always wrong. They’re full of pathos, he says, and they sound correct, but in fact they are no such thing. ‘You always get the Greek wrong. Always.’

But sometimes, for a moment, the clouds do clear. ‘You manage to speak sense’, says W., ‘or something like sense.’

‘There was that pub in Oxford’, W. remembers. ‘We all fell silent and listened in wonder. Not to what you said, which may or may not have been sensible, and in fact probably wasn’t; it was probably the usual pathos and hot air, but that you could say it.

‘You of all people. No one expects it of you. Quite the opposite in fact. Which is why it’s so surprising.’ W. himself was amazed. ‘And there was that time on the docks in Plymouth. The clouds parted. You spoke sense for nearly an hour.’ What did I speak about? W. can’t remember. But he’d been amazed, he remembered that.

‘You should never hang on to conversations,’ says W. He never does. But he’s a great believer in discussion and friendship. ‘Not like you. You’re not capable of friendship. You’re always about to betray me. All you want is to be adored’, says W.

My ‘Vest Phase’

W. admires the rituals of football. That’s what it’s all about, he says, as we sit among the football fans in the pub, the ritual. You go to the pub, then to the match and then back to the pub to discuss the match. It’s the ritual that matters. But you don’t know anything about football, do you? Or discussion. It’s enough you can do to drink. That’s all you do night and day, isn’t it: drink. It’s why you’re so fat, isn’t it, fatboy?

W. is impressed by my arms. ‘They’re huge’, he says. How come he’s never noticed before?, he wonders. It must be my vests. ‘You’re going through a vest phase’, he says, ‘and it doesn’t become you.’ How many vests do I have, he asks me. Thirty. ‘Thirty vests! All the same colour?’ Yes, all the same colour. Olive green. ‘Thirty olive green vests’, says W. ‘They make you look fat’. But what about my arms? ‘Oh yes, you’ve got big arms. Too big. They’re monstrous.’

Loyalty

W., who has a keen interest in military history, is telling us about the Greek phalanx. The soldiers locked their shields together, he says to form a great defensive wall. Their spears would poke out the front. Together, loyal, they were almost invincible, says W. Of course you wouldn’t understand any of this. You’re not loyal. You know nothing of loyalty. You would break the phalanx, says W. You’d be the first one to break it.

W. admires loyalty everywhere he finds it. Take the animal kingdom. Swans! says W. They mate for life! You are the opposite of a swan, he says. Friendship means nothing to you. You’d betray me for a woman, he says. In fact, that’s what you always do. You’re always about to betray me, he says.

Beatitude

W.’s flight was cancelled. He’s stranded in my flat. It’s a shithole, he says, and starts to read Spinoza to forget the cold and the dark and the damp.

When he reads Spinoza, W. says, he feels beatitude. Beatitude, he says, the third level of knowledge. ‘You’ve never felt beatitude,’ says W. ‘You’re not capable of it.’

W. is a mystic. One day he might become properly religious. ‘Do you think you’ll ever become religious?’, he asks me. He says that he might. Sometimes he feels on the verge of religion.

The Ethics, says W. It’s the only book I’ve ever thought is completely right. It’s the opposite of your flat, says W. God, it’s cold. And dark. Why is it so dark? And why does nothing work? Do you just go into the shops and ask for the shittest thing they have?

W. wants to read Spinoza in Latin, but he’s forgotten all he knew of the language. He’ll have to learn it again! But it’s not a chore. You have to read in the original language, he says. Next he’ll refresh his Greek, W. says.

We used to learn Greek together, only he and the others had the answer book, and liked to watch me squirm with my exercises, having cribbed from the translation in advance. Your idiocy, says W., was spectacular.

For his part, W. has given up learning differential calculus. ‘It’s beyond me’, he says. Will he ever really understand Leibniz – and Cohen, with his mathematical mysticism? Never mind, he says; he has Spinoza. Ah, The Ethics, he sighs. Beatitude!, he sighs.

My Affects

W. wants to understand me. He’s decided to list my affects. ‘It’s like the tick in Deleuze’, he says. ‘It responds to heat and warmth. It’s a very simple being. Like you. You’re simple.’ 

‘We’ll start with the living room’, he says. ‘Are you taking notes?’ I’m writing on a post-it pad. ‘It’s cold’, he says. ‘Write that down. I’m freezing. How can you live like this? And it’s dark’, he says. ‘There’s no light. I can’t see anything. And it’s damp. That’s another affect.’ I’ve got the dehumidifier on, I tell him. ‘It’s still damp’, says W.

And why am I always putting vaseline on my lips? ‘Vaseline, he says, that’s another of your affects. The internet. You like writing on the internet, don’t you? How can you go on writing that bilge? You’ve got no honour. No shame. No goodness. And looking out of the window. That’s your other affect, isn’t it? Look at it out there. It’s shit. How can you live like this?’

W. is still listing my affects. He’s delineating the basic categories, he says. ‘Television. You like TV, don’t you?’, says W. I tell him I don’t watch it that much. ‘I’m not surprised. The remote is broken. How can you watch anything? So what else do you do? Are there any affects for you in the bathroom?’ I’m indifferent to the bathroom, I tell him. ‘What do you think about when you’re in there?’ Nothing, I tell him. You, I tell him, and he laughs.

‘Well then, your bedroom. Is that where you do your reading? You don’t really read anything, do you? You don’t read. And what about the kitchen? Stacks of tins of fish. You eat the same thing every day, don’t you? Exactly the same thing! Tinned fish! For his part, W. is a believer in a varied diet. ‘I try to vary what I eat. Not like you.’

W. has a larger range of affects than me. ‘I live with someone. That’s what does it. Otherwise I’d be a sad fucker like you.’ Of course W.’s house is much nicer, he says. It’s not cold, for one thing. Or dark. Or damp.

W.’s tired of listing my affects. How many have we got? Eight general categories, I tell him. He looks around. ‘Oh fuck it, that will do.’

The Chair of Judgement

W. is visiting and I give him my bed, inflating another one in the living room.

I’m ill, I tell W. ‘You’re not ill, you’ve got a cold. A mild one.’

No one knows about it when W. is ill, he says. ‘I’m not a whiner like you’.

We watch the scene in A Scanner Darkly, where Freck has his sins read to him by a creature from between dimensions. ‘We’re going to read your sins to you in shifts. It will take all eternity’. This gives W. an idea.

Later, W. installs himself in the chair of judgement. I’m on the pump up bed, ill on the floor. ‘I’m going to list your shortcomings’, he says. ‘Your life. Where should I begin?’

W.’s at his happiest criticising me. I like being criticised, he says. ‘Masochism and sadism’, says W. ‘It’s perfect’.

Writing or Life?

Writing or life – but is it a choice? ‘When you eat, eat’: the old Zen proverb. Eat, live – and do not think about writing as you eat and live. But conversely, when you write, write – and what would that mean, to press writing more deeply into writing? to write as concentratedly as you would live?

But surely writing lives from your life – from what you can recount of your life. Surely writing is always parasitical, and to write is always also not to have lived, but to have saved something of life for writing. This is Greene’s famous claim about the writer having a sliver of ice for a heart: always watching for an experience to relate, for the beginnings of a plot. A coldness, a distance from life: how can this be avoided?

Another thought: isn’t it from a surfeit of life that one might write – the too much of the day, its great breadth and the many events happening everywhere? Write in order to die, says Kafka. Write because there is always too much to write. And what does death become? A shelter. Or writing becomes a shelter for death, for dying.

Whence Rilke’s Malte who cannot but die in the death-boat that was made for him. But his horror is that he’ll die like any other in the big city to which he has come. In modern life, he thinks, we have lost death – death has lost meaning. What then of the storyteller?, as Benjamin asks. Can there be stories when death is no longer part of life, of living? How can stories find their end when there is no real end to life – or death?

Writing or life? Writing the non-end of our living. Writing dying, anonymous death in our cities. Is it that life cannot, now be written? That a whole alibi for writing has vanished? Writing or life – and now writing becomes a desire for what is missing from life; it is life searching for life and via the left to right movement on the page.

But read down our pages and what will you find? A writing that has become strangely obsessed with itself. Writing that asks for life in order to be more than life. Not to provide our testament, the last will that our life, if it cannot be rounded off in death (the rituals that surround death) must be rounded off in writing.

For writing also testifies to itself – to that demand by which it draws the living to its own non-life. Upon what would it seize? For what is it looking? For its own icy heart. For the ice of its non-heart, writing lost within itself and wandering.

Fever Dreams

Casual notes in response to Waggish, who responds to an earlier post of mine (and which was, in turn a response to an earlier post of his).

Wolfe was an engineer, being said to have played a part in developing the machinery that makes Pringles crisps, and he brings an engineer’s delight to the creation of some of his literary worlds. It’s our delight too, say in ‘The Death of Doctor Island’ – a story I haven’t read for many years (and I don’t have a copy of the collection from which it comes): a sick boy on a false moon – does it orbit Jupiter? – what we take to be his fever dreams are, the literary engineer shows us, made of tiltings of his moon’s orbit.

Was that right? Do I remember correctly? The engineering was marvellous – but the fever dream of the story was more so. Like the many-sailed spaceship Wolfe lets us explore in The Urth of the New Sun, I was distantly comforted to know the story was science-fiction and not fantasy. Real laws applied; something of John W. Campbell remained in Wolfe: hard SF remained at its core: hard SF, only Wolfe had dragged a white hole into its dimming sun. But beyond the hard SF, something more – I read Wolfe when I was much younger; I was young enough to have still the attitude of the writer Mumpsimus persuasively corrects in this post, and young enough never to have met any kind of religious person.

That Wolfe was a Catholic (converting before his marriage) – this was wonderful. That he believed (as he said once of the Soldier series, still incomplete) that the gods of the Greeks were real and walked among them meant that he was more than an engineer – that outside the artifice of his world-making, there was the reality of God the Outsider. The fever-dream of God! Wolfe was a fantasist before he was a engineer, but unlike the Catholic novelists I’d also read – Greene, say or the later Waugh, his Catholicism did not saturate the plot and incidents of his fiction. He was engineer as well as a fantasist – there was not a tension between them, not really; I think God the Outsider always remains for him the real agent of creation. Literary creation for Wolfe is only ever idolatry. A fun idolatry, though; a happy artificing – if it is not innocent, it is not wicked either.

But doesn’t this prevent his fiction from bearing upon another sense of the Outside – not the real world as a referent, as the source of literary representations, but the reserve the world hides by seeming all too real? Does literature – beyond any notion of the ‘literary establishment’ Mumpsimus places within quotation marks (and beyond Establishment Literary Fiction) – bear upon a kind of truth, of a correspondence between word and referent? A correspondence, rather, with what the world is not – or that nothingness (is that the word?) that inhabits the world as reserve; that means it might become other than it is.

To read is to free the world in some quiet way. To free it from what it is, and to set free, as reading, what you are, too, who might otherwise commit that idolatry that takes our consensual world to be all it might be. For this reason, Steve’s remarks on McEwan’s Saturday are forever justified: the conventional book answers to the world of convention; it confirms even that non-reality that Bush: confirms the new world being made and remade around us, this world of lies and cyncism. And so literature really can take an axe to the frozen sea inside us, and the frozen sea that is the world.

Is it worth noting, in this context the right wing sympathies of Wolfe’s Operation Ares? And if Wolfe really is a man of the right (too quick? too simplistic? and doesn’t he think Operation Ares a bad book?), and is this why he is content to make genre artifices rather than what might be called literature (as Steve’s This Space is the guardian of this word)? Or is it because God is his fever dream, God who would have the monopoly on all true creation and compared to whom Wolfe is another storyteller beside the campfire that is the sun? I am happy to dream with Wolfe, but I feel uneasy when I wake. And isn’t this what I want from reading – to wake up? 

I Was There

Track of the year? Easy. Rickie Lee Jones’ ‘I was There’, from The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard.

I am admirer of devotional music, music that seems to meditate on an events in religious narratives – not, though Taverner’s ‘musical icons’ which seem kitschy to me (but perhaps I am put off my the image of the solitary composer that he presents; the creator-aristocrat), nor Arvo Part’s petrified choral pieces, ice cold, out on the planet Mars.

It’s a voice close to speech that I want to hear – a speech-song, close to popular idioms, vernacular, and the devotion revealed in a happy deformation of song, the stretching of some part of its elements – it’s becoming jazz-like, improvisational. And a sense of that voice trying to find something, discovering, and not only the heart of the narrative (in Rickie Lee Jones’ case, the Passion). A voice that also discovers something of itself – that looks for itself in the singing. That sings to dwell in itself, looking for itself, losing itself, and this even in the case of RLJ, who after all has had a long career.

You can hear it on the whole album – The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard, a long meditation on the life of Jesus that cluminates in its last, long track, 8 minutes long (I’m listening to it now): something has been lost – the assurance of an RLJ idiom (not simply the jazz-boho shtick of the early albums. More than that), and found because of the narrative and its musing, its recreation (but the last album, The Evening of My Best Day was also a renewal – out of political rage, was that it?). Jesus on the Saint Monica Boulevard. Jerusalem become Los Angeles, but keeping too the old Biblical signifiers (Jerusalem, Israel, and Babylon (‘what happened was Babylon …’)) – keeping them, renewing them as those names are mixed with new ones.

A devotional music – guitar-work Astral Weeks-like: generous, opening the song out into a song-world. Chords that open out the song, that right away you know will let it encompass everything. And the voice – intimate, searching, virtuosic in its dynamic changes, its softnesses and risings. And the lyrics – extemporised, made up all at once, you can hear that, I think.

Who is the RLJ who sings this? I haven’t heard her before (previous highlights: her cover of ‘Comin’ Back to Me’ from Pop Pop; the many sweet songs of Traffic in Paradise; ‘Last Chance Texaco’ that Morrissey played very loud to the muscians who would play on ‘Late Night, Maudlin Street’, another miracle of extemporisation …) A devotional music – because it really is the Passion story that allows it. That story, retold, that permits of an entirely new mood in her singing. I’ve never heard her like this before … she’s never been heard like this before …

I admit that I love Messianic lyrics – as on Nina Simone’s album ‘There’s a New World Coming, as it resonates strongly with the contemporaneous civil rights movement – RLJ sings at the same end of times, but in a different way, more tenderly, intimately. ‘There you were in your white dress shirt/ Most of all I loved your hands/ I loved them so much that it hurt …’ Witnessing for whom? The one the bartenders knew. And the pimps.

A devotional music. A song-prayer, but to whom? A passion – but for whom? For the voice, in part. For the singer’s own voice that has become strange to her, and strange for us, her listeners. A rapt voice. A voice that moves – with dips and rallying points. Drowsy sometimes, but suddenly attentive. Almost asleep – sensually drowsy, I would want to say that. But waking – tenderly, and in a new kind of tenderness.

‘I was there’, she sings. And ‘you were there’, sung many times. ‘Where Jesus walked’. She addresses the others who were there sometimes. There – with Jesus, or drinking wine and eating bread with him? or in communion? – and sometimes sings to Jesus himself: ‘We thought you were going to set Israel straight …’, but Israel, now, is only the Biblical Israel, the chosen ones who are also the benighted ones.

Verses? A chorus? None of that. The song pulses. Not quite revolves. But returns to itself, regathering. Musing, meditating. Returning to an event, to the significance of the event. A récit of the event. A Bhagavad Gita of the event – a divine song that sings of the divine song. The song lodged in the greater song. ‘You’ve been travelling in so many universes …’ Pulsing – the song rediscovers the song. And the singer her own singing, reaching deeper into her voice than she can. Devotional.

Don’t mistake me. The song is not great because it undertakes a journey of faith. The Passion is the Passion of the song first of all. And the faith is given entirely by the voice, of the voice (just as Bob Dylan says: I don’t believe in anything but those old songs). A voice rediscovers itself in the Passion. Rediscovers tenderness, sensuality. Rediscovers Babylon and Israel (the Biblical Israel). And the Nazarene? A name for what calls the voice, what draws it from itself. A name for that singing called forward in its maximal tenderness, in its stretched-out sensuality. Generosity – is that the word? Giving – is that it?

Who is RLJ’s Jesus? Who is he, sung of in tenderness? Who that awakens this devotional song? A name for the sufferer of all suffering. A name for Jerusalem at the heart of Babylon, where suffering changes its direction, where it rears itself up into a life – where it lives concentrated in one agonised form. The Passion names nothing other than this. To suffer – and for whom? For everyone, and with the suffering of everyone. It is not that the meaning of suffering is changed. It is not. ‘The Son of Man’ is a name for all suffering. For suffering in the kingdom of Babylon, which is to say this world, the only world.

But there is the promise of a kind of redemption, too. The promise that is Messianism. Not of the transmutation of suffering. Not the end of pain. But the fact that it can be spoken – sung. That it is given issue and can be heard. That the wrongs can be heard, and perhaps right can be done. Babylon speaks and sings of itself. Babylon discovers Jerusalem and sings of it (the Biblical Jerusalem). That is devotion. That is what it had meant to be there. That’s what it means to sing from there.

I’ve worked well, I can be pleased with what I’ve done. I’ve put down the pen, because it’s evening. Twilight imaginings. My wife and kids are in the next room, full of life. I have good health and enough money. God, I’m unhappy!

But what am I saying? I’m not unhappy, I haven’t put down the pen, I don’t have a wife and kids, or a next room, I don’t have enough money, it isn’t evening.

from Vila-Matas, Bartleby & Co

Campbell Kneale of Birchville Cat Motel speaks in an interview from 2002 on the influence of suburbia on his music.

I’ve always sought to find inspiration in my location. Currently that location is suburban Lower Hutt. Suburbia has a nasty reputation for being a congregation point for soullessness but I have come to disagree. I have seen brief glimpses of a very deeply ingrained spirituality here, not connected with any obvious religious affiliation, but connected with the big patterns of human existence. Work, sleep, travel, children, hospitality, home decorating… what would probably pass as ‘boring’ or ‘significant’ to your average E-popping, superficially urbanite, ravebunny, again links people with a much larger pattern of life that has continued unchanged, other than on the surface, for countless generations. I find the mundane very beautiful and very grand.

I admit to being simultaneously moved and repulsed by what Kneale says here. I’ll come clean: I am moved and want to be repulsed. I think I wanted to say something similar here, say and here (here, too) but I know, too I haven’t said a thing.

An interesting long interview by J.G. Ballard from 1974 (via Ballardian).

The whole notion, the distinction between fiction and reality, is turned on its head. The external environment now is the greatest provider of fiction. I mean, we are living inside of an enormous novel, written by the external world, [by] the worlds of advertising, mass-merchandising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, and so on and so forth. The one node of reality left to us is inside our own heads.

He’s then asked whether this correlates to the idea of ‘inner space’ mentioned elsewhere to Ballard (and so important to other New Wave science fiction writers). He now nuances idea of interiority:

I suppose we are moving into a realm where inner space is no longer just inside our skills but is the terrain we see around us in everyday life. We are moving into a world where the elements of fiction in that world – and by that fiction I mean anything invented to serve imaginative ends, whether it is invented by an advertising agency, a politician, an airline or what have you; and these elements have now crowded out the old-fashioned elements of reality.

He is interrupted by his interviewer, but continues:

What I am saying is 20 0r 30 years ago the elements of fiction, that is politics within the consumer society or within one’s private life, occupied a much smaller space. I can’t quantify this exactly but it was sort of 50/50. But now I don’t think this is the case. I think we have seen the invasion of almost every aspect of our lives by fictions of one kind or another. We see this in people’s homes – the way they furnish their houses and apartments. Even the sort of friends they have seem to be dictated by fictions, fantasies, by standards invented by other people to serve various ends, not necessarily commerical. But we’re living more and more in a hot mix of fictions of every kind.

Now I think the writer’s job is to – he no longer needs to invent the fiction, the fiction is already there. His job is to put in the reality. The writer’s task now is to become much more analytic – he’s got to approach the subject matter, and especially the science-fiction writer because I think he’s the most important of all writers – he’s writing the true literature of the 20th century, the only important one.

Ballard now speaks of the role of the science fiction writer being analogous to a scientist – proposing hypotheses, such as that entertained in Crash, that car crashes might have some ‘beneficial role’, and applying them to the subject matter of fiction.

Putting in the reality – what does this mean? Trying to discover how people – his or her characters – might live in this new domain? Then the task of science fiction (speculative fiction) is to discover forms of individuating that are already happening. To hypothesise just as we are all hypothesising with our lives with respect to how we might live in our new world.

Literature and Artifice

I like Waggish’s comments on Gene Wolfe’s work – I admit, however, that I find his prose entrancing; I’ve reread The Book of the New Sun twice not only because I love Severian’s picaresque adventures, and thinking about the riddles Wolfe seems to set us, but because of those winding sentences – because I love the narrator’s voice. Is it right to point out that the games of the unreliable narrator are just games – that there is no reason why we are prevented from assessing the truth of what is told us?

This is what Waggish finds frustrating, and says has separated Wolfe from other genre writers who have won mainstream literary acclaim. At one point, I remember, Severian, the narrator, tells us he knows he is mad; I underlined the sentence as I read it; I thought: this is important; something will be made of this. But the end, nothing was; the fiction remains untouched by madness – how different, then, to Priest’s The Affirmation (see Mumpsimus’s remarks) which, like The Book of the New Sun, I have read three times in all.

I’ve always found Wolfe’s preface to Endangered Species (a much weaker collection than The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories, as most of his later books are weak) disingenuous: his stories are just stories told around the campfire that is the sun. As Peter Wright’s thorough Attending Daedelus shows (scroll down the comments for a summary) I think quite convincingly, The Book of the New Sun and its sequel are about artifice, about fabrication. Even the hierodules are idolators, false angels imitating the Creation without being themselves creators. It takes Patera Silk of The Book of the Long Sun to come into contact with the one genuinely Outside. Severian never reaches the one called the Outsider – or not that I remember. Silk does – albeit in a series far weaker than the New Sun (I’ve never read my way through to the Short Sun books).

The Outsider, of course, is God. God beyond games, beyond the idolatry of Pas (of Typhon). And now I ask myself about Steve’s comments on the relationship between literature and genre, wondering whether genre is content to remain fictional; to construct a world, to dwell with its characters in it; for event to succeed event in a rich linearity.

There is nothing wrong with this – of course not. But there is another kind of writing – and what Steve calls literature refers for those books for whom The Outsider is not God. For whom, then, fiction gives onto the unencompassable Outside as it names language, as it names the world. ‘All works form a genre in coming into existence’, says Steve. They form a body; they take on plot and character; they offer themselves to be read. But ‘resistance to genre marks the literary’: then plotting and characterisation must themselves be at stake in the fictional work. Then fiction, artifice must be shown for what they are. The writer is an idolator, not because there is a God, or that God could name the Outside. The writer is an idolator because of that Outside, which admits only of idolatry, that will not allow for any other means of approach.

Is this what Wolfe tells us in The Urth of the New Sun, when it becomes clear that the hierodules, whose name means temple slaves, are mere artificers, following an evolutionary imperative? Is it that there is only idolatry, sham creation? Or is there a way in which the Outside can speak itself via the same artificing – that it breaks the surface of the novel, as when we understand in The Affirmation that the fiction is only idolatry, even as it is the only way to bring the Outside to speech? A resistance to genre – I wonder if Urth, otherwise so unsatisfactory, rises to this when the hierodules are revealed to be botched makers like ourselves, not gods, as Wright’s innovative and ingenious reading shows us? In the end, however, I think Waggish is right (see also his comparison between Priest to Wolfe in this earlier post): Severian may be a liar, he may be mad, but the book itself is terribly sane, remaining but a particularly lovely artifice among other idolatrous artifices.

The Last Récit

One might take Blanchot to be an altogether calmer writer than Bataille; after all, he has at his disposal a pellucidly readable style – his essays are written in the serenest French. But his fiction – and in particular, his récits – places the same clear style at the service of the most opaque of thoughts.

Who has not had the experience, reading of him, of being unable to discern what is happening in the events he reports, and especially in the second half of some of his récits, where everything becomes unclear: who is speaking?, what is happening? Still, although most of the récits are written in the first person, and it is tempting to reflect on their autobiographical origins, it may seem that Blanchot holds us apart from his life; that his fictions are like the multiple rooms the narrator of Death Sentence rents at the same time.

Rooms, spaces that must be left to cultivate an absence undisturbed even by him, the narrator – he likes to muse upon the absence in those rooms he has rented, and does not like to receive visitors in order to preserve what he can of absence in the apartment in which he is currently domiciled. Absence – now conceived as it pushes itself into experience, as it asks to be experienced as the most vehement of presents.

Blanchot’s narrators will call it cold, vast – the rooms and his corridors in his fiction seem to expand to encompass the whole universe; how is it possible even to cross such a room? how many steps will it take? But each step, too, is a step not beyond – it is the absence of movement, its paralysis, an arrest that also fascinates Blanchot and that he will let his narrators present as a dying without term.

Where is Blanchot in all of this? Is he the narrating ‘I’? Is he the one who speaks, or looks to discover himself speaking – or, beyond that, to listen to the other side of language as it speaks – the ‘it speaks’ that resounds, murmuring beyond anything you or I might say. I refer to that thickness of literary language which he often evokes – a kind of density that removes, in fiction what an author had intended to write. A literary remove – the space of literature as it simultaneously expels the author and solicits him, asking for books to write themselves from his pen, even as it burns blackly beyond him as the work, unseizable and, in its distance, free.

Let me say too quickly that it is this same distance that absents Blanchot’s récits, that seems to void them, denucleating them, drawing their reader to that point that seems to maintain itself at its distance. And that it must absent them for him, too, according to his own literary criticism – that Blanchot is certainly the author who completes his books, has them published, and refuses to publicise them in interviews, or appear in public, but that he is also the adventurer who is lost in the detour of his fiction – of a kind of literary desert, far greater than the Biblical one, that aches, vast and absent, on every page of his work.

And now imagine Blanchot, like the narrator of Death Sentence, revelling in the absenting of himself he accomplished in his fictions. Imagine him, writing another one – one more récit – and happy in that absence he has already effected, in those books that bear his name but that also tear it apart.

Who is he, the writer? Not the author who lives in the world, in an apartment in a prestigious suburb of Paris. Not the one only a few friends saw, who lived surrounded by photographs of friends, it is said, and who was gradually losing his ability to hold a pen. Blanchot the writer lives in that absence that burns in his books and comes to us in that suspension when our reading asks in vain for linear continuity, and his récits seem to fall back into a language that absents itself from all reference to the world.

From all reference – and yet, and yet … The narrator of Death Sentence says little of the events of the war. That’s not what concerns him, he says. Tiny, seemingly insignificant events impose themselves on the second part of his narrative. The first is almost a well-rounded tale; it bears upon an event that barely seems to complete itself; the death of J., the dying of J. And the second? Event links to event in an obscure, almost free-associational pattern. But there’s an urgency to the telling, a sense of movement. Something important is being communicated. Something great significance asks to be said.

If it is to do so, it is by way of reference, of the measure of some literary verisimilitude; the world of Death Sentence, though removed from us in time and space, is still our world; we can make our way across the narrative, which is composed almost entirely of concrete events and only occasionally breaks into that strange abstraction that comprises the second half of the fictions that follow.

‘Virgil, that’s Broch’, says Blanchot in his reading of The Death of Virgil. And who is the narrators of his fiction? Who writes his criticism? What speaks in his narrative? What rumbles there? The war? No – beyond the war. Beyond the world. Or an absence that devours it from within. A hovering, an incompletion – isn’t it language, somehow, that is allowed to speak? Language, and so that what is told becomes an allegory of what cannot be told, or that speaks only indirectly?

There is nothing ‘behind’ the details of the narrative. A book proceeds. Characters, plot – there is still something of these in Death Sentence. And yet what, too, speaks by way of them? What seems to cloud the clarity of speech – what great opacity, what looming cloud that obscures the sun? Blanchot, that’s Monsieur X. – that’s all we learn of the narrator’s name: X. – but as it marks what spot?

The work is freeing itself from the book. The work – the unseizable that draws after it all writers, all readers for whom literature vouchsafes itself in its remove. The work – and it burns beyond Death Sentence now. Burns – and after we put the book down, after we read the final sentence. It is over – but it is not over. There is something unreadable in reading, as Steve reflects. Books like Death Sentence (but are there many of those?) are still as though untouched by reading; they remain perpetually uninhabited – room-husks that ache with absence that is our own absence; mirrors in which we cannot see ourselves. ‘Read me’. ‘You will not read me’.

To be the Message …

Alexander Irwin’s Saints of the Impossible is a thorough, engaging book, at once sympathetic to the authors under discussion – Bataille, Weil – but also critically independent of them. I think that it is this independence that troubles me, since they are authors, as Irwin shows us, who sought not only to communicate a message, but to ‘be the message: to put into reader’s hands a text consubstantial with the writer’s own self, to live a life crafted as a vehicle of poetic, spiritual and political meaning’.

To be the message – to write, for that message to be ‘revolt’, in Weil’s case, and never, she says ‘the exercise of power’; like Bataille, she realises what Irwin calls a ‘literary sainthood’ – transmitting an attitude, a ‘style of existence, an orientation that perhaps cannot be  precisely verbalised, but whose emotional atmosphere the "addressee" absorbs (by "contagion", as Bataille would have it) though the hagiographic text’.

To write as a saint – to consecrate one’s life in writing – both writers call on their readers to do something similar; both write, then, the equivalent of Ignatious’s Spiritual Exercises. Inner Experience is a kind of self-martyrdom, a ‘written performance of the text’, as Irwin calls it, but it is essential to understand that it aims at results – at a kind of conversion of the reader that can happen only insofar as the reader in turns lives the experience the book incarnates.

How extraordinary that this book, Bataille’s first full length publication by a major publisher, comes out in the early years of the war! ‘The date on which I begin to write (September 5, 1939) is not a coincidence. I am beginning because of the events, but not in order to talk about them’: the first line of Bataille’s Guilty, which followed Inner Experience into print. What, then, does he talk about? Mystical experience, apparently – a kind of inner war (even if the notion of interiority is called into question), wherein Bataille writes ‘with my life‘, keeping open what Irwin calls ‘a laceration of consciousness’ – a ‘wound’ Bataille offers others ‘as the basis of an obscence and "intoxicating" communication’. And it is this wound that he offers as an alternative to the civilisation that has revealed itself in the real war around him. A wound – a style of living, of writing, a ‘mystico-literary self-stylisation’, as Irwin calls it, whose writing has taught him, ‘I am not a philosopher, but a saint, maybe a madman’.

A saint, a madman – it would take such a non-philosopher to show how the war was also a response to this wound (not Bataille’s, of course, but one that constitutes human existence); that what appears to be politics has, in fact, a religious and aesthetic dimension. All this Irwin explores these topics thoroughly and fair-mindedly; I read the book greedily, all at once, but I remained troubled, too by the author’s very ability to situate Bataille and Weil within a tradition.

Irwin writes of a long French tradition in which the writer is upheld as an exemplar – as ‘sacred’. The example of Pascal, for example, whose work underwent a revival in the 1920s, Iwrin tells us, particular by way of Bataille’s friend Chestov, combines literary brilliance with a quest for salvation. The post-Romantic avant-garde had comprised its own tradition of holy figures – Rimbaud, of course, as both poet and seer, but also Sade, in whose work several of Bataille’s friends were interested, as well as Poe, Baudelaire and others. At the same time, in the 20s and 30s, the Surrealists produced books like Nadja and Paris Peasant, in which they presented their own meanderings around Paris, their encounters and experiences as a kind of template of Surreal existence.

Literary self-stylisation, then, was a commonplace in the Paris in which Bataille and Weil wrote. In the same period, it was assumed quite widely, and in very disparate camps that political turbulence had spiritual roots; religious and aesthetic discourse were immediately relevant to the concerns of interwar France. Come the second world war, and Bataille’s retreat to ‘mystico-literary self-stylisation’, to a solitary written performance after a turbulent decade working alongside others in various avant-garde groups, does not seem, in this context, so surprising.

His work issues from a tradition; the revival of Pascal, the avant-garde canonisation of Sade and Rimbaud, the minutely rendered accounts of their life by prominent Surrealists – but why does this trouble me? There are writers I would like to think cannot merely be contextualised by their times, but seem to contextualise it in turn; writers who do not simply belong to history, to the great procession of events, but who send history strangely off course. Writers, then, that come at me from another angle – that are not part of the world and the account of the world I recognise.

It is as if they spoke from a higher, wilder place – that, from some promontory above the storms they write by the light of the most distant stars. And that they reach me – that their books found me, that I came across them, one after another, as stepping stones that would lead to a place behind the world, as though you could pull open a curtain and disappear. And I have felt that to read them was always secret, sacred – that their books demanded to be kept apart and away from others.

But from Irwin I understand that I am only a convert – or that what I want is to be converted, for reading to also become a kind of self-stylisation. And that I stand in a long line of those who want to be converted – reader-believers, and readers who want to believe most of all in a power of a certain kind of writing … and that, like them, I share the great naivety that there is an importance to writing beyond that of writing – that, as Bataille thought, his inner war made him the most qualified of all to understand the secrets of the outer one that raged about him.

It is difficult not to conclude that, beyond its challenge to specific forms of political oppression, Weil’s and Bataille’s cultivation of sainthood marks a virulent contestation of the human condition as such. That such a generalised feeling of outrage could surge up among people living an ‘epoch deprived of a future’ is stil perhaps understandable.

But we, who hope to have a future still before us, may judge the ‘attraction to the impossible’ celebrated by Bataille and Weil as sheer romantic hubris. We may see here an effort to cloak with exalted words what is at bottom a puerile refusal to soil one’s hands with the inevitably messy, frustrating business of merely ‘possible’ politics and ordinary, ‘unsacrificeable’ existence.

And yet, and yet … Why is it I think Bataille and Weil should be approached only by another writer-saint? Why do I dream idly of a book written at the level of their thought, their life, their writing?

Simone Weil sought to turn her life into poetry. To live – to be willing to die – as the leader of a cadre of frontline nurses in occupied territory. This was in January 1943 – arriving in London from the USA where she escaped occupied France with her parents, it is physical danger she craves, to be parachuted behind enemy lines, or to care for the wounded in the thick of battle. Instead – what disappointment! – she is found clerical work for the Free French organisation.

Still, over the next four months, she finds time to write some of the work for which she is most famous – reflecting on theology and religion, translating sections of the Upanishads, analysing Marxism; 800 pages spring forth from her pen. At the same time, she reflects on force – her abiding concern – reading advanced mathematics and physics. Alexander Irwin, from whom this account is drawn, writes:

The manuscripts show that Weil’s handwriting flowed with an almost supernatural steadiness, rapidity, and assurance in this period: page after page streaming out virtually without hesitations or corrections. She often worked around the clock, staying through the night in the office in Hill street or walking home long after the last Underground train and continuing to work in her apartment for several more hours, all the while coughing steadily and violently.

The force and substance of her life were poured in an almost literal way into the writing that filled her notebooks, in a procedure reminiscent of the transmutations and requalifications of matter and energy on which she speculated obsessively in her metaphysical texts. The physical collapse that occurred on April 15, 1943, was surprising only in having been so long in coming. Weil had written herself to the brink of death.

Weil is diagnosed with tuberculosis. Hospitalised, though refusing the treatment that might help her, she undertakes to eat only as much as those rationed in France. She dies on August 24th, 1943.