Lars Iyer's Blog

1.

This morning, if I am not quite hungover, I am still tired – pleasantly so – from yesterday’s barbeque and the long Sunday afternoon in a suntrap backyard. Tired enough to be unable to work away at the papers I am to present at the beginning of next months, but content enough not to worry. A content that is made not from the specifics of yesterday’s events as they would crowd my memory, but a beatitude that underlies them and, I know, gave them and gives itself to me now. The same beatitude as I would dream would one day give me writing – a dream, a hope, under whose sign what I write here is written.

Let’s say to write – to write literature – is to experience over and again the surprise of the strength to write. It is, the perpetual reassertion of what Kafka called the ‘merciful surplus of strength’. To experience the surprise of the strength of being able to write – that strength which does not seem to come to me, but to have been bestowed. Writing, it is as though I have been seized by a current that is always streaming through the world – a secret streaming that rattles tea-cups and scatters papers even as it passes through the trees and the houses. A streaming captured by the camera of Tarkovsky’s Mirror as it passes across the used tea things (a cup rolls from the table, the wind passes through the trees, miniscule events, but events in which everything happens).

Too quickly (but I have written on these themes before, and this should not be a surprise): Inspiration is explication, the turning of what inside over to the streaming of the outside. It is that exposition wherein I am posed outside of myself, and no longer according to the boundaries of the self. It is implication, whereby I am folded into the unfolding of all secrets, and the opening of all closed spaces. So is writing the streaming of that streaming; it is the joy and beatitude of a freedom which is not my own.

How marvellous that burst of strength that, sustained day by day, allows a writer to realise a book, a world, populated with characters, thick with plot! A book trusting in steady strength – that strength which laps forward day after day and each day lived in the propitiousness of writing. Miraculous time that allows a book to be born!

That, I presume, is why writers quit day jobs, why they seek to make the everyday that stretch of time in which a book can make itself. In the closed space of a study, the writer is always outside, unfolding in the strength that sustains the narrative.

But what happens when that strength fails? When it breaks down? Perhaps the author drinks; perhaps she turns to other concerns. But always the sadness of non-writing and unfinished work; always the non-bliss of a life lived outside writing.

2.

In the closing chapters of Goldberg: Variations, we find the fiction we have been reading revealed as a fiction – not by Josipovici, but by that author whose work it is supposed to be. That same author feels deserted by the work; the strength which he feels bore his writing these past three years, which sustained his research into late eigtheenth century life is no longer his. Oh he can write, but this is a writing which stages the wreckage of his belief in life and in writing.

He has told several related stories about Goldberg, the storyteller of repute who been commissioned by the insomniac Westfield, owner of a large country house, to read stories that will send him to sleep. Goldberg has left behind his wife, his children; this is the latest in a series of commissions which, as a jobbing writer, allow him to earn money. We know he loves them, his wife and children; we read letters in which he writes of his love. They are far from him, but he will return, perhaps with money enough to have the roof of his house repaired.

Then, when the fictional author is himself deserted by his wife, he will allow Goldberg to desert his wife, to write her a final letter which explains that freedom which has seized him such that when he leaves Westfield’s employ, he will not return to her and his children, but will wander in search of another life – or, better, in the claim of a search whose aim is only searching.

It seems so long since I arrived here, yesterday afternoon, intrigued by my comission, curious about the house and its owner, my heart suffused, as always, with love of you, and never doubting my ability to do what I had been asked. Now it feels as though it was only on arrival here that I really began to live, that all my life until that moment had been a happy dream, like the dream of childhood.

[…] If I did not have you of course I would not be myself but someone else, someone without substance and without purpose, without a role and without feelings. I look for this person and know he exists, that he is not so very different from the person who, in his misguided integrity, refuses to comply with the demands made upon him by Westfield. It frightens me to admit this, but perhaps that is the person I have been discovering mself to be in these last few hours, as I have sat here writing to you.

I can imagine myself now getting up from this table, packing my things, making my excuses, and departing. But not in order to return home. For that person has no home to return to. Not in order to come back to you and the house, to my wife and my children and my animals, but rater to wander out into the world, alone and invisible, without a place to rest his head, without skills, without even a language to speak.

These beautiful passages (there are many more) are a shock to the reader. Then, experiencing this shock, we learn what we might have suspected: that the chapters of Goldberg: Variations that we have read up to now is a sample of the book this fictional author has been working on for three years. A book that now means nothing to him, perhaps because his wife has left him, perhaps because he has left England in the wake of her disappearance for another life without another woman, and perhaps (though this could be a result of what happened) because he no longer believes in what he has written.

In the last chapters of Goldberg: Variations, this lack of belief becomes the substance of each chapter which now bear more transparently on the predicament of their fictional author. He no longer has the strength to believe in the world he was making; it is all frippery and fakery and now he will bid Goldberg to leave the same wife and children to whom Goldberg has dreamt of returning.

But he regains the strength. He is addressed by the voice of the other who instructs me to pay heed to what speaks in the between of the story. I have written of this voice in the last two posts here; I will not do so now. Let me say simply that what speaks is the beatitude of writing.

After this marvellous conversation, we find Goldberg writing to his wife once again. He doesn’t know if he is asleep or awake, whether he is writing in his dreams or whether what he writes is simply written in the depths of the night, when Westfield’s entire household is asleep. Even Westfield sleeps – but is it the sleep of a real character, or that sleep into which the book, the Goldberg: Variations, has retreated? That putting-to-sleep of a project and letting there come forward in its place what we, Josipovici’s readers, receive as the Goldberg: Variations?

Of what does Goldberg write in his final letter? Once again, in his faith in his wife’s love. In the faith of his return. He has passed from the time of destruction to the time of healing; the world is coming together again.

My dear. It is done. He is asleep. I have accomplished what I was asked here to do and I am very tired.

It seems so long ago that I left home. I am longing to return and see you and the children. I am very tired.

[…] I am very tired. I am very sleepy. It is all over[….] at the back of everything is the sense that you will be waiting for me, wherever I come home, to whatever home I come. Yes. You will be waiting.

And can we not say that this ‘you will be waiting’ is what the fictional author of Goldberg: Variations experiences as the between? Is it not, above all, the sense that writing, the beatitude of writing, is waiting for him?

3.

What right have I to speculate on the experience of writing a novel? I have never written one – or rather, though I might have tried, many years ago, the means deserted me, or, I should say, I lacked belief. Still, I wrote, and wrote from this lack, filling pages with the madness of a writing without topic, character or plot, a writing which was supposedly seeking its conditions of possibility: a writing that sought, by writing, to seize on its lack and to make good on this lack. Yes, a writing counterposed to what I experienced as the everyday but, for that reason, unable to seize itself as the truth of that same everyday, as the beatitude which sings out from tea cups and scattered papers.

Later still, I gave that up, or rather, once again, the means deserted me – I didn’t have belief to write in non-belief and writing disappeared, or rather, was reborn in the desire to make academic writings – dissertations and papers, books and essays. But the latter were only an experience of non-writing and non-belief. I thought: if I am patient, something will happen. If, patiently, I write a great deal, then that writing will be seized by the same belief-in-writing that once deserted me.

Has it happened? Is it happening, and if so, where? Certainly not in the academic prose I continue to compose – prose reworked over and over, prose redrafted dozens of times, prose overwrought and overwritten, contorted because it never seems lucid or simple enough. Perhaps what vouchsafes itself here is the dream of a writing that happens at one stroke – that is born in a simple forward movement which grants itself to me as simply as day succeeds day. Yes, that beatific writing commensurate with a beatific belief in the world and in my powers of writing as they are engaged by what lies outside them.

1.

These are pleasant days, quite empty and calm, the flat above me as yet unoccupied by the students who are coming in September. I will remember these days as those in the wake of the Great Summer of Going Out, of the pubs in the Ouseburn Valley. But September is coming; summer has passed its midpoint, and now there is preparation to be done for the new term.

It is Thursday, but it could be any day. The flat is calm and quiet and I have just finished a book. The name of its author will not surprise you: Josipovici. And just like the last book of his I read, it has passages which are marvellously Blanchotian, beautifully so, taking what I love from the novels of that author and bringing them to life again, and in a new way.

Should I write here of Goldberg: Variations? I have already annotated a couple of chapters. Those towards the end – ah! Chapter 22, which recalls The Last Man! Chapter 26, which reminds me of The One Who Standing Apart From Me!

It is true that I decided to read it this evening to get it over and done with. That is an admission. I had thought, I am catching the many references here – to Kierkegaard’s Either/Or (Chapter 18), to Sinclair (chapter 13), confidante of Holderlin. Catching them, but they are doing little for me. In fact, they are a little irritating. Exercises, that’s all. And do I really have to hear that Holderlin line about danger and saving grace again? It’s a cliche! And I thought: these variations, which leap from character to character are being told in the same voice. That’s what I thought.

True, I had half guessed what is to come: it was written, all of it, by a fictional author. The one we meet in the middle of the book, whose wife leaves him as he comes near to completing the book we are reading, and whom we meet several times more in the chapters near the end of the book. This device is familiar from lauded authors John F—-, Peter C—- and A. S. B—-, none of whom I care for. Indeed, it was reading such books that turned me from modern fiction for many years. How hate those authors and the whole crew! I thought: why is it I like none of the books others like? Why is it prize winning books are so dreadful?

2.

I have just put Goldberg: Variations book down; it is still new to me. I know the reading will work through me for a number of days, like a spreading wave. Yes, it will do its work and I will write about here, although I have much else to do and there is no more than a hour a day for ‘free’ writing.

Regular readers will know with what wonder and surprise I read the following exchange:

– Perhaps it is not the details that count, although every story is made up of details, but something else.

– What? he asks.

– That which lies in between, for example, the other says. In between the details and in between the different stories. Perhaps you have lost heart because you have lost the ability to recognise the importance of between.

– Of course, he goes on, such loss of confidence is almost inevitable, for if you could see the importance of between it would no longer be between and so would no longer be what is important.

– Between, the other goes on, is only a way of talking. It is perhaps the only way of talking about time. Time the healer, not time the destroyer. Only another way of asking you to trust in time, in the time of working and the time of reading.

The conversation, between the fictional writer and the ‘other’ who accompanies him in writing, continues. It is one I will quote again. It has a beauty I find nearly unbearable – not for the prose, which is lovely enough, but for the thinking enacted in that prose. What wisdom! What refinement!

I flatter myself that I have learnt some things by writing here and elsewhere. Learnt that the forces engaged by writing do not belong to the interior of the writer; that there is also a kind of kenosis, an emptying, that voids the writer of herself.

More recently, I learnt the lesson about details – the details which make up a fiction. That was through meditating on Kafka and Handke. And now? I am learning about the between – about the trust and the work of reading which carry you from one shore of the book to the other. Which is the between-the-shores of reading.

Reading this conversation, I considered myself corrected: I should have been watching for the between, should have allowed it to work through me. Instead, what did I do? Bored of the book, I took it to the gym. I wedged it in front of me, cracking its spine so its pages would stay open as read while I exercised on the elliptical trainer.

Then, a sense of shame. I thought: no, I should put this aside. I should pay more attention. I did; and took it up later in the quiet of my office. Hours passed; then I brought it home to the quiet flat and finished it here. Hours which seem propitious only in retrospect, since they lead me to the final chapters. For only then were they retrospectively illuminated by what I think of as the candle flame of the between.

What I mean to say is that the hours spent reading a book I thought I didn’t care for have been repaid me. That I have been returned a hundredfold for the effort of reading. The end of the book gave me its pages again. Wonderfully, the penultimate chapter is one which should, according to a chronological sequence, have been at the beginning (at least as it bore upon the story strand of Westfield and Goldberg). This is true delicacy! What grace! Reading it, I thought: and so I have regained the book, and these hours after the gym.

3.

I’m not sure why these notes are necessary. Why do I feel the need to mark reading here? Why do I feel a need to write this, here? Nothing is explained, not really; I seek only to redouble the movement of the book, trying to attest in my own way to its singularity. I am interested only in repetition, in the workings of a book and not in explanation. But in this repetition, the book comes to me again not in part but as a whole, in the great leap that it is. A leap that is the book’s freedom against which I do not want to test my own. This is beatitude.

4.

– Between, the other goes on, is only a way of talking. It is perhaps only a way of talking about time. Time the healer, not time the destroyer. Only another way of asking you to trust in time, in the time of working and the time of reading.

– But how can I trust in time when nothing that is done by me has the quality of authenticity?

– You and your questions, the other says. I have told you. Between is only a way of talking. What is important is not to be found  in any place and it is not to be found in any time, either the time before you began or the time after you have finished. It is not inside anything or outside anything, but is what has made these things happen. Do you understand me?

Who is speaking? The other. Who is the other? The voice comes, ‘What makes and has made these marks is not you, the other goes one, and it is not not you’. I would say this: it is the condition of fiction which speaks through its details – that a priori which leaves its traces across what is read.

It is the equivalent, if I may put it this way, of the castle of Kafka’s novel, as it stands it for what, in fiction, is at once the banal, the everyday (the castle is coextensive with the village; Klamm an ordinary man behind the desk) and at the same time, the reserve that turns and will not face you.

That turning is telling, and that telling occurs by way of details. Those turning details cannot but speak of the between that is the articulation, the hinge of telling. Of what cannot be written directly, but is the condition of writing.

Who speaks? The other. But the other who speaks is the narrative voice of the novel, the one in whom you must trust in order to be borne from moment to moment in the novel’s itinerary. The one in whom even the novelist must trust insofar as he is only his own first reader and does not know its secrets.

The novel begins. Its author is its occasion. But the beginning sets itself back further than the intentions of the novelist. It lapses into the space which can only repeat itself, saying the same thing over and over, I am, I am, I am. Literature is what lets speak this I am which is attached to no speaker.

The other speaks in Josipovici’s novel. Thus does literature speaks of itself, of its remove, of the between that, once you’ve come of the Goldberg: Variations, speaks the articulation of what its fictional narrator calls ‘this absurd charade […] this costume drama with only fragments of costume still clinging like seaweed to the bodies’. It is the candle within the magic lantern, and the lighted images that give themselves to reading are its gift.

1.

There are those among us whose lives seem incomplete, or less complete than our own. They search, but for what are they searching? What is it they want and what might we give them? Perhaps there is nothing can be given; there is no cure. The search is all.

Sometimes, that search will awaken in us a search of our own. As though we were implicated in their search. As though, because of their incompletion, we too experience our incompletion. But this is an experience at one remove from theirs.

What does it mean to love someone like that? You will never have them, that is true, perhaps – or they will never have you. There is a mismatch; she (let us say it is a she) has turned away from you. She turns and turns and does not face you. But that, by itself, fascinates.

Perhaps part of us wants to be not wanted. That is why, in love, there must be gaps of non-love, where the other, the beloved, turns away. Then you will have to earn her love again. You become the hunter and so your love is reborn in ardour.

But what if the turning occurred before there was love? What if it occurred at its brink, at where there should have been the beginning of an affair? Then, after she has turned, you are not sure anything happened. Did it begin? Or was it stalled before it began. Either way, you have still been caught, implicated. Love did not begin. But its possibility began; a space was opened.

2.

I am thinking again, for the last time, I promise, of Josipovici’s In A Hotel Garden. Two events: the grandmother, Lily, in her youth, meets the young violinist, already engaged, in a hotel garden. They talk all day; nothing happens between them. They do not meet again. He is killed by the Nazis. For a long time he sent her letters, and once a toy donkey. Now he is dead. The grandmother marries; soon she has a daughter; she moves to England and her daughter has a daughter in turn.

The grandaughter is called after her grandmother. Lily comes to Italy to find the hotel garden; she finds it. But now, perhaps, another almost affair. She meets Ben, another holidayer from England, whose partner is sick. They walk in the hills. He asks her about the hotel garden; eventually she tells him. But now, in this telling, and because of the time they spent together, they are brought, it seems, to the brink of an affair. Only when they meet again, in London, Ben finds Lily has returned to the partner whom she had left. She had told Ben about her lover while in Italy. She had come to Italy to think about her affair, she had said. But in London, Ben finds he has returned to him, her lover. She is back with him and his dog.

3.

When they meet, Lily tells Ben she might have been wrong. It might have been the wrong garden she found. It doesn’t matter, she says. She just felt she had to tell him. Because he’d helped her to talk about it. She feels a bit like a fraud, she says. She says the trip to the garden helped. ‘I just feel more established in my difference now I’ve been there’. Later:

– I suppose it’s to do with a past, she says. Having your own past and nobody else’s. This is you. There isn’t anybody else like that. There never was and never will be. So it’s a responsibility.

Having a past. It is now she speaks again of Absalom. What does it mean, this responsibility? To have a past and to feel different in the way one has a past? It is, I think, a responsibility to oneself – to find out the secret plot of your life. Has she found that plot for herself? Has she found the event that even if it does not explain her to herself will allow her to find her way toward the future? I considered this in a previous post.

4.

This book is about Ben, not just Lily.

Ben speaks of Lily to his friends. To Francesca, married to his friend Rick. She once had a relationship with Ben. Ben had loved her, though that was a long time ago. And now? Francesca is happy with Rick and they speak of Ben. Their conversation:

She said to him: – He went on at me about whether he should see her again or not.

– And what did you advise him?

– How could I advise him? she says. Whatever he does it’ll be wrong.

– Why wrong?

– It always is. He thinks about it too much. It’s all theoretical with him.

A bit later:

– Oh for God’s sake, she says. He doesn’t know her. He’s only obsessed with this garden of hers. And it turns out not even to be the right one.

– It might be the right one, he says.

– Oh it might be! she says.

– I don’t think it matters anyway, he says, whether it’s the right one or not.

Francesca thinks it does matter. Later, she says, ‘Anyway […] there’ll always be another woman with another garden’. Just as, as Francesca had said to her husband earlier, Ben went out with the woman from the Egg Marketing Board just because he was intrigued by such a job title. But this is facile. We know there is no comparison betweent the Egg Marketing Board and the hotel garden.

Later still, married couple go to sleep. And Francesca says, ‘Do you know anything about Absalom’s hair?’ Ben had told her of Absalom earlier. They sleep. I think to myself, reading, what would Francesca, or a woman like this fictional one, know of Absalom and of what the Rabbis said about him? Everything is easy for her. She has her husband, her dog, her child. She thinks she is practical, but in fact she has just been lucky. Perhaps, as she says of herself at one point, she is just unimaginative.

But think of Ben. Think of the way the incident in the hotel garden reverberates through him. We always hear him questioning Lily. Does he understand, now? Perhaps his is the condition of Absalom in the wood. He is tired and frightened and everything is happening too fast. But that is melodramatic. He is simply confused. What should he do? Call her again?

5.

The novel does not tell us what he does. But I think he needs Lily because her event has somehow become his. That he has found with her something similar to what her grandmother found with the violinist in the hotel garden. Of course he will not be killed by the Nazis like that young man. But there is a sense that those events are being repeated in pianissimo.

She left him quite abruptly in London. She said, goodbye and gave him back to himself. But now he is incomplete. Francesca is wrong to say Ben is too theoretical. Rather, he has been left in the wake of an event, an encounter. He has been uncompleted. Now he complains to Francesca that it is left to him to phone or write to Lily. Why does everything have to be so complicated, he asks?

As I say, we are not told what happened. Is the hotel garden any different to the Egg Marketing Board with respect to Ben? But Ben is not a real person and in the end, to be fascinated by this book, to be implicated it, is to experience this difference for oneself. In this way, the book itself might become our hotel garden.

6.

How different this is, say, to McEwan’s Saturday. I refer you to Steve’s posts here and here on this novel. The upshot: Saturday does not allow you, as reader, to experience the Iraq war in the manner of the hotel garden. The whole event passes you by. Perhaps a whole ethics of reading and writing could be framed in these terms.

1.

Telling proceeds by way of details; it does not lift itself from them, but buries itself in them and can only be known by way of them: I like this thought so much, which is to say, the way it imposes itself upon me and allows me to experience its necessity that I cannot help repeat it. This repetition becomes the telling about telling that passes for reflection on literature at this blog.

2.

At the heart of Josipovici’s In a Hotel Garden is the telling of an event that happened long ago, to the grandmother who has the same name as Lily, the woman around whom this book turns. A meeting in a hotel garden with a young man, a violin student at a conservatory who, though engaged, continued to write to the young woman the grandmother was. Lily, in the present, may have found that hotel garden in Sienna; she went to Italy to find it. There, she meets Ben, who wants to know what it means to her, the hotel garden. In the end, the story is revealed to him: the young violinist was murdered by the Nazis, along with his family. They never met again, the grandmother and the young man. There was no affair. Just the meeting in the hotel garden and after that, the murder.

Running through the novel is a meditation on Absalom, the spoilt son of David who came to desire his father’s kingdom. It was whispered to him by a flattering advisor that he was the Messiah, that kinghood had been prophesised for him and glory awaited him. Thus was the indulged Absalom tempted; thus was he led towards his destiny. Absalom, known for his beauty – every year he cut his long, luxuriant hair and showed it off to impress the people – died when, as he rode with his army, his hair was caught in the branches of an oak. The Bible says he hung between heaven and earth while his horse kept going. Then he was killed as he hung by three thrown spears. So are his pride and vanity rewarded; so does his rebellion lead to his ignominious death.

– Do you know what the rabbis say about Absalom?, she asked him.

– The rabbis?

Absalom gloried in his hair – therefore he was hanged by his hair, she said.

And then later:

– I wonder if it’s really like that, she said.

– Like what?

– He gloried in his hair so he was hanged by his hair.

– You mean …?

– If life has a pattern like that. And, if it does, whether we can ever grasp what the pattern is when we’re in the middle of it.

A pattern? What does this mean? That there is a secret event that determines the course of your life.

– Do you think Absalom understood? she asked him. At the end? In the wood?

He looked up at her again. She was still staring straight at him.

–  I don’t think he did, she said. I think he was tired and frightened and everything happened too fast.

Did Absalom understand the fittingness of the means of his death? He did not; his story becomes clear only for us who hear his story. Its fittingness becomes clear in the telling, as the Rabbis observe. So too may we miss the appointment that would have revealed to us what for our whole lives we sought.

3.

What does Ben, the stranger she meets in Italy mean for her, for Lily? Why does she feel the need to speak to him? He is a stranger, but he is interested, receptive. Perhaps there is an attraction between them. So she speaks and he listens. She speaks, and he wants to hear more. Soon the whole story is told. Perhaps she has discovered something too, by that telling.

Later, when they are back from Italy, she agrees to meet Ben in London. To start an affair? – We know she has gone back to her lover. There is no affair, no melodrama. Once again, there is a conversation. Once again, it concerns Absalom and the hotel garden.

– He had his hair, she said. No one else had hair like that.

– I had a look at that passage, he says. With a father like that what else could he do?

– ‘He chose to act as he did, she says. He chose to do that with his hair.

Ben wants to excuse Absalom because his father spoilt him. Lily disagrees. It was Absalom’s choice to weigh his hair every time it was cut, revelling in its glory, she says. With that choice, she says, he set his destiny in motion even if he would never understand it. But we understand, as readers of the Bible and of the Rabbis. Perhaps the lesson is that we have to take account of the choices we have made and of the destiny upon which they set us.

Then they turn to the event at the centre of the novel.

– But that past, he says. What you told me about it. It has nothing to do with you, does it? It was just an episode in your grandmother’s life. It may not even have happened as she told it.

– It doesn’t matter, she says. That day was a turning point for her. And for me.

– But it didn’t change anything.

– It did for me, she says.

Perhaps the encounter in the hotel garden was the event that has set Lily’s course. Lily, who bears the same name as her grandmother. Lily who flew to Italy to search for a hotel garden. Perhaps what she is trying to understand is the meaning of that ‘choice’ which occurred two years before her mother was born. A choice which has set her destiny in motion.

How hard it is for her to understand what this might mean! We find her struggling to understand as she speaks to Ben. As she tells Ben of an event that as it were caught her up even though it happened before she was born. That implicated her in its unfolding, and will now, in another way, implicate Ben.

And then:

– Not just that day as she told it, she says. But everything that happened afterwards.

– You mean his death?

– Everything, she says.

The life of the young man who met her grandmother was ‘snuffed out’, she says. ‘[I]t’s the silence that’s so frightening’. For his part, Ben says he cannot admire a man who’s engaged and still writes to the grandmother. What kind of man is he? Then Lily changes the direction of the conversation.

– Anyway, she says, when something like that happens it makes you think not just about your own past but about that of Jews as a whole.

He presses her – surely she doesn’t mean just the Jews. But she does, this Jewess. Just the Jews. To think of humanity as a whole is too abstract to her.

Now I think I understand the relationship between the discussion of Absalom and the encounter in the hotel garden. Lily was one born after the Holocaust. But it implicates her as a Jew. It is experienced as such in terms of the death of the young man who talked with her grandmother in a hotel garden. It is in those terms that the horror of what happened is given to her to experience. That catastrophe.

4.

How does that event implicate Ben, as a non-Jew? And me, as a non-Jewish reader? I won’t answer this question directly. This instead:

Once, I think, I would have found In a Hotel Garden disappointing: the event in question, when it is told, does not awaken the heightened language of poetry. It is not Celan. But then what is told is related at several removes from those to whom it happened and told by people who inhabit our present – not just Lily and Ben, but Ben’s friends. The event ripples outwards. It is known only by these ripples.

Perhaps the recounting of the event falls uniquely to prose, to literary prose. It must reach us by presenting itself in the experience of those like us. Such is not a domestication of the event, but something like its commentary. One that sets the event against the mundane, and lets speak, in their tension, the prose of the world in which the outside presses towards us.

To tell is not your gift, but one that is given to you. The same with reading. You are elected to write or to read; your freedom comes afterwards, and even then it is haunted. You are chosen, and only the other chosen will know you as such. Your rendezvous with a book is an event as secret as that Lily tries to describe. It has slipped into your past, a past that cannot be made present.

Henceforward, you will be joined to what as though turns you inside out like a glove. To be implicated in telling, caught by it, is to be exposed, opened, at your heart, to a wound that cannot heal. A wound that is also an opening, that raw place you will never be able to bring to speech.

The French philosophy of the last fifty years knows it as the a priori. It reveals itself by its traces, being reawoken in this case by what you are told by other books.

Perhaps, reading, you find yourself wanting to write of what you read just as I am doing now, this calm Tuesday morning, to tell it again at as yet one further remove.

But of what do I speak? Of the event of literature or that of the Holocaust? How might they be thought together?

1.

No doubt the turn to more personal themes here at the blog makes it tedious to read. But the intention was to reach a kind of impersonality that streams through the personal, if I can put it that way: to release interiority over to the streaming of the outside. That sounds vague. Well, it’s the experience at the heart of the telling that happens here (of blogging).

My turn to literature, to reading recent literary works, is my attempt to understand what telling might mean, and how the non-tellable, the event in which dispersal and streaming occurs, might be told. The idea: only the telling that belongs to literature is adequate to the experience in question. Of course, this will require a definition of literature – of what it might mean to read today books written today (or recently): books which experience the challenge of the disappearance of the older order, of that contract between reader and writer that depended on the security of traditions and custom.

Perhaps Kafka’s famous dictum that a literary work should be like the axe which breaks the frozen sea inside us might be understood in these terms. Waggish writes wonderfully of a kind of the refinement of certain storytelling techniques in American fiction:

Modern day American fiction has evolved into a sort of psychological shorthand, in which physically descriptive details and moody variations on images have come to point to a shortlist of mutually agreed upon emotions. By definition, none of them are particularly original.

Then he writes:

… they tell us what we already know – or rather, reiterate what we’ve already heard. The pretense lies in perpetuating the myth that these stock emotions have an emotional veracity transcending their unoriginal artifice.

How can we be told of what we don’t know? By another kind of telling – one which breaks with stock emotions. This describes wonderfully, for me, the disappointment of reading a magazine like Uncut, which recycles tedious macho myths about filmmakers , musicians and writers. It reminds me of the writers I used to try to read because they won this award or that and of a literary repetoire – the tedium, say of A. S. B—- and writers like her, who belong to a consensus about what literature is what it is meant to be. Who allows herself to be pictured – how repugnant! – and interviewed at length. I find this loquacity unbearable – and the desire to be tied to a photograph – how repellent! True, there are some writer’s photographs which attest to a kind on inward disturbance or collapse – I think of Leiris’s picture on the back of Manhood, but the tying of writing to a proper name is already unbearable enough …

But here is the point: coming back to reading literature after many years, I experienced the power of a telling that broke up the frozen sea inside me. And revealed that what was inside me was never there, that the inside, like the alveoli of the lung is only the fold of the outside. What does this mean?

2.

Josipovici‘s In a Hotel Garden bears upon an encounter between the grandmother of one of the characters, Lily, with an unnamed young man in a hotel garden in a town in Italy. We hear about this event at third or fourth hand, and the drama of its unfolding and its impact upon those who hear it is the drama of the book. In particular, the book concerns Ben’s attempt to get the story of the hotel garden from Lily. She has alluded to it, but is unwilling to tell him about it as such. They go for a long walk. Later, Lily says:

On the walk […] When we really tired. Coming down on the other side. And then sitting having coffee in the hut. I had the feeling that I was telling you about it and it was making sense – to me and to you. I don’t need to find the words, they were just there, I had only to think them and you heard them. Not even think them. Do you know what I mean?

Ben says he does not.

We were so tired […] It was if we turned inside out. Do you understand? Like gloves.

Curious that W. and I have separately written of a tiredness so complete, of a boredom so encompassing that there is no one there to be tired or bored. And both of us wrote of being turned inside out like a glove. No more interiority. Only the streaming of the outside.

This is telling. This what it means to tell of the hotel garden – to write, but also to read.

3.

For many years, all of my 20s, I wanted to write and devoted as much time to writing as I did to my studies. Reading back now, I see I wanted to seize on the bareness of telling – to write a writing which spoke without details, which burnt away the dross and left the raw experience. Reading Kafka again, and Handke, taught me my mistake: telling asks for details; it demands them. Only by details – Klamm’s eyeglasses, the faces of the peasants, the beer in pools on the floor of the public house – might telling occur. This was a life-changing lesson: literature’s gift, which can also be the gift of film (Tarkovsky, Bresson …) and of music (Will Oldham, Bill Callahan), is given by way of details. Only thus might the event, the hotel garden, be told.

4.

Back in November, Steve wrote at This Space:

There is one reason that keeps me writing: hope. The hope that I might be able to write what I need to say because it could not be said in any other way.

He continues:

That said, I am not writing.

There is also the hope of reading, which is much the same: to find, at last, the narrative that allows me to breathe and to step forward actually; not vicariously through a character or the author’s experience, but actually to step forward.

How do I understand these lines? I ask myself, Is to step forward is to let something fall into the past? To exorcise the narrated event and the need to narrate? Perhaps. This hope is the life of writing, of reading. But what if the event in question and the accompanying need is the condition of all narration, of all telling? Then it will never recede. There is only hope and there can only be hope.

But this is bad faith – literature’s bad faith – that one might be able by way of the details to have done with the event. For there is no having done. The event is always on the verge of oblivion, of falling into the absolute past, just as it is on the verge of disappearing into the future. Experiencing the beatitude of this remove of literature is what gives us the hope and abandonment of reading and writing.

(see also this at The Mumpsimus and a new post at This Space)

Some days you have to be patient. As always, I could not help but wake early; the lock-in and free beer did not prevent that, and though I had a hangover, I worked well for a few hours. Then, just as I was describing the attenuation of the verb ‘to be’ – the experience of an infinite weariness, an infinite wearing away, if experience is the right word, where even crossing from one moment to another is a great task -, I felt the force of that attenuation.

Tiredness. I walked to the office; I stayed for many hours and nothing happened. Tired, beyond tired, hours passed, most of the day passed. Then I read a great post at Waggish and thought began again. For some reason, I picked up Josipovici’s In a Hotel Garden and began to read. Now against the backdrop of tiredness, not making it disappear, but as it were straining against it, I read quickly.

The hours fell away. Soon the novel was finished. Buried at its heart was an encounter. The grandmother of the female character, Lily, told her granddaughter how she met a young man, already engaged to another in a hotel garden. She was a young woman then, she said; and they talked, that young man and she for the whole afternoon. Then she and her family, who were on vacation, left for another part of Italy. Unexpectedly, the young man turned up a few days later. He spent more time with her; he departed. Then, later, she learns he was killed, along with his family, by the Nazis. She too, the grandmother, was called Lily.

Here is what the grandmother said of the conversation in the hotel garden:

We talked about everything. Nobody disturbed us. It was if we were sealed off from time. And from other people. It was as if I was there with him, talking, and as if at the same time I was at an upstairs window, looking down at us talking. I couldn’t hear what we were saying but I could hear our two voices, like two streams, intermingling and flowing together. And then it was time for him to go, and he went.

Relating the incidents in the novel in this way is too hasty. The central event, which gives the novel its title, is told in pieces. We hear it from the granddaugher, born in Britain, as she relates it to a man she meets on holiday. She, the younger Lily, has just found the hotel garden, we learn. It was not as if she was told where it was. It found her. She knew it was where she wanted to come. And she knew it was there she could meditate upon a relationship in which she was unhappy. Then she went to the mountains, where she met the male character, who is with his partner on holiday. He presses the woman for the story of the hotel garden. Eventually, she tells him. We hear her telling the story and we hear him relating the story she told him to another.

But the novel is not her story, the woman, the granddaughter. It is also about the one she tells it to. The one whose partner leaves him after his trip to the Dolomites. There’s a beautiful moment, which reminds me of some of my other favourite writers, where she says she thought she had told him what happened in that hotel garden as they descended from a mountain they walked up together. Thought that she had shared the secret of what happened there even in their tired silence. Of course, she had said nothing; nor had she, at that time, yet told him of her grandmother. It is Duras, pure Duras – the incident whose meaning is as yet unknown, which we only know, as readers, at several removes. The incident which resonates through the story in various ways.

But that is only to say that In a Hotel Garden reminds me of Duras, not that it’s derivative. And of what else does it remind me? Inevitably of Handke, in whose novels there is a preoccupation with telling, with the act of telling. Everything radiates from an encounter. In this case, marvellously, the encounter is set back yet farther as it is discussed by the male characters and his married friends. The wife thinks he, Ben, the male character, is the sort who will always love women who are drawn to a hotel garden of one kind or another. The wife is made to complain about those obsessed by the Holocaust. Why can’t they move on?, she demands.

How delicately Josipovici writes! How lightly! I know I will read this book again. I am drawn to the same hotel garden. It opens to me now, even after I closed the book. In fact, it is only after I’ve closed it that it seems to call me to it. What is the event? What is that is being told? The grandmother encountered a young man. He was killed by the Nazis. The Nazis killed his entire family. He was a Jew; so was the grandmother and, of course, her granddaughter. Being a Jew is nothing to do with belief in God, the granddaughter insists. The one she speaks of about the hotel garden is not a Jew. He is very interested in the hotel garden. We sense that he is interested in her. Is she beautiful? We don’t find out. The wife says, I would understand if she was beautiful. She thinks he, the male character, is foolish.

– Anyway, she says, there’ll always be another woman with another garden.

Ben finds out Lily, the Jewish woman, has returned to her lover. She wants to see him again. They walk along the Embankment in London towards Westminster Bridge (I walked there the other day). She says it may have been the wrong garden, the one she found. She parts from him. She extends a hand and goes up the stairs to the bridge and then goes away. Should he contact her? She had said ‘goodbye’. He discusses his dilemma with the couple. We do not learn what happened.

At the heart of the story is an event. Lily says:

It came to me at the airport. Why it was so important, that garden. It’s as if that day their whole lives were present to them, their lives before and their lives after. Everything that would happen and not happen and all that would happen and not happen to their descendants. Everything. Enclosed in that garden. Held together by the trees and the wall and the silence. That’s why I had to go there. To feel it for myself.

Ben says, except it was the wrong garden. She replies:

It doesn’t matter where it was. The important thing is that everything came together in a single moment in a single enclosed spot. And if I could really feel it, really understand it, then perhaps I could understand why I was alive and what I had to do.

In a hotel garden: am I right to understand that in this enclosed space there was the unity of tradition? That broken thereafter was that same unity? Ah, that’s too quick. She says, Lily, that it the catastrophe was a Jewish catastrophe. He asks her if it wasn’t a human one. She can’t think like that she says. Later, to the married couple he will complain that there are too many difficult decisions to made in life. Whether to phone her or not to phone Lily again, for example.

How difficult everything is! Difficult for Ben, says the wife to her husband, later. Not for anyone else. But then she is crass, the wife, and lacks imagination. Something has changed. Something has changed in the nature of telling. No longer – to be brief – is it subject to the great norms, the great certainties of an older form of life. No longer trust, then, but suspicion. Telling is magnetised in Josipovici – as in Duras, as in Handke – by a kind of uncertainty. No borrowed terms will do. No traditions, no norms impose themselves. Telling must speak of this, too – must speak of the uncertainty of telling. That is what literature is. This is the experience of literature now, today: the telling in which telling is wagered.