Tense beginnings

Sandra of BookWorld draws my attention to Susan Hill's Creative Writing Course, run from her popular blog. Hill warns readers who might take part that she is "the Simon Cowell of the Aspiring Writers' world", which presumably isn't intended to mean she knows nothing about art and everything about marketing. Anyway, the first part is harmless enough and involves identifying opening paragraphs of novels that "urge [you] either to read on immediately or to shove the book back on the shelf". It's a good start.

As I've mentioned before, I'm drawn to reading about Creative Writing courses, not only because I'm keen to look everywhere for the way forward with writing but also because, as that link attests, I'd probably be very negative and alienate my previously enthusiastic colleagues. It would be another act of literary self-definition. The only creative writing course I have taken, however, is my own. And I'm more Morbo than Simon Cowell.

But going back to the question of novel openings. Sandra makes it clear from her own search that there is no guarantee of reading-on in either a slow-burner or a meteorite. So it must be something else, something more fundamental. And that reminds me of an essay in The Singer on the Shore in which Josipovici quotes Proust on his own unexpected reactions in reading:

I have to admit that a certain use of the imperfect indicative – that cruel tense which portrays life to us as something at once ephemeral and passive, which, in the very act of retracing our actions, reduces them to an illusion, annihilating them in the past without leaving us, unlike the perfect tense, with the consolation of activity – has remained for me an inexhaustible source of mysterious sadness. Still today I can have been thinking calmly about death for hours; I need only open a volume of Sainte-Beuve's Lundis and light, for example, on this sentence of Lamartine's (it concerns Mme d'Albany): 'Nothing about her at that time recalled … She was a small woman…etc.' to feel myself at once invaded by a profound melancholy. (from On Reading)

"The use of a tense in a book" Josipovici explains "or of a preposition or conjunction, seems to force upon us truths we had hitherto protected ourselves from, or which we could never have experienced if left to our own thoughts."

Hence Proust's defence in the same volume of the significance of Flaubert's style. His use of "the passé défini, of the passé indéfini, of the present participle, of certain pronouns and prepositions ... renewed our vision of things almost as much as Kant, with his categories and his theories of knowledge and the reality of the external world."

Yes, reading others is a good start.

Monday links

Lee Rourke reviews Tom "Remainder" McCarthy's second novel and also my current reading Men In Space.

This coming weekend Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson has This Feeling of Exaltation, an open series of poetry readings, panel discussions and music celebrating the 80th birthday of John Ashbery.

The Existence Machine responds, in part, to my essay on The Frank Bascombe Trilogy.

Joan Acocella reviews the final volume of the Hollanders' superb translation of Dante's Divine Comedy (link via). I've already added this to my Wishlist along with the next item.

The 27th of this month (or the 22nd) marks the centenary of the birth of Maurice Blanchot. The single event in English that comes close to coinciding (though it's scheduled for November) is the publication of Blanchot's Epoch, a collection of essays edited by top UK Blanchot scholars Michael Holland and Leslie Hill. The title suggests Blanchot's time is over, but the book description says otherwise:

The twentieth century ... may be thought to have been Blanchot's epoch. As he himself was aware, however, no epoch is properly contemporary with itself. If he speaks of his own age from a place firmly embedded in the struggles and transformations which marked it, therefore, he also writes from a place which exceeds the confines of that epoch, and where history in the received sense gives way to a totally different mode of time.

Irony, or the shelter of a lie

With his customary pluck, Ed Champion combats the disdain attached to irony as a literary device: It "may be a helpful tool to the contrarian thought process, but it is apparently the stuff of tots. Basic human skepticism and healthy chicanery are now beneath the current elite." He goes on to criticise various critics for dismissing those big American novels which make us all so unhappy (especially if one hasn't read them).

The critical establishment has no desire to give itself a swift kick in the ass, much less exhibit the kind of playfulness and inclusive expertise that makes for good criticism. If the critical establishment cannot effect these qualities, then it deserves to die a lumbering and painful death. This monster has only itself to blame for ignoring so many passionate qualities.

Of course, the predicted death will not happen because rigor mortis already constitutes the majority of establishment reviewing practise. (By the way, I plead guilty to not having read what Ed calls Ozick's "criminally underread" essay, so if anyone's got a copy they can forward, please do).

Still, I think scepticism over irony is not entirely ill-placed. A useful definition of irony as a device and irony as an affliction is provided in Joakim Garff's biography of Kierkegaard. Garff doubts the latter form of irony - "an arrow of pain ... lodged in my heart" - that Kierkegaard claims to have had since his earliest childhood is the same irony as performed in his books.

A child may be satisfied with employing a bit of irony, with pretending, with crawling into the shelter of a lie, with using language in a manner different from what other people think. In this case one says something other than what one means, or one means something other than what one has said. This is irony. And it is good to have it at the ready when other people abandon us, which of course they do. Sooner or later. (Translated by Bruce H. Kirmmse)

Later in his life, Garff says that through his study of the German Romantics, Kierkegaard "inhaled irony's urbane ether" and "during the calamitous course of his engagement [to Regine Olsen] he developed [it] into a sort of desperate perfection", as demonstrated in a journal entry of 1848 alluding to the engagement:

A wishing, hoping, searching individual can never be ironical. Irony (as constitutive of an entire existence) consists of the exact opposite, of situating one's pain at the precise point where others situate their desire. The inability to possess one's beloved is never irony. But the ability to possess her all too easily, so that she begs and pleads to become one's own - and then to be able to unable to possess her. That is irony.

Garff continues (I won't use the word "glosses" as I dislike it as much as "normative" and "trope"):

Irony is thus something more and something different than a spirited turn of phrase for the delight of one's dinner partner. Irony is (also) an intellectual distance from others, from the world, and from oneself, a prerequisite for being able to die away. And as such, irony is an extremely sophisticated but also a very risky maneuver that can place the ironist in a life-threatening condition.

Those large American novels are, almost by virtue of their size and ambition, "wishing, hoping, searching". Certainly all three are prominent in the passion they generate in readers and potential readers - why else would they care? And they don't "die away" either. So how are they ironic? Perhaps the ability to write such novels is itself not ironic. There are so many! But their inability to become what we want them to be - despite or because of the attentions of critics - maybe that is.

Everyone and nothing

According to the BBC, "Actors including Sir Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance have lauched a debate over who really wrote the works of William Shakespeare".

The 287-strong Shakespeare Authorship Coalition says it is not possible that the bard's plays ... could have been penned by a 16th Century commoner raised in an illiterate household.

Elsewhere it is also being asked how it is possible that the combined intelligence and talent of so many people can produce such small-minded irrelevancies.

Dirty but clean

A few weeks ago, the TLS ran a review by Edward Luttwak of The Reagan Diaries and, like Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez, I was appalled and completely unsurprised that his administration's policies in Central America - the euphemistic 'dirty wars' - were not mentioned. Cazorla-Sanchez wrote to the paper to wonder if "30,000 people killed in Nicaragua alone were not important enough" to merit a mention. This week, with his familiar insouciance, Luttwak replies:

My ... review certainly did refer to Central America: "Until I sat with him and a few others serving on the transition team to discuss the El Salvador war in detail and depth, I too half believed the stories" (about Reagan's incompetence). But that was certainly not a 'dirty' war. It was a very clean war indeed in which I am proud to have played a small part, by helping villagers defend themselves against guerrillas who refused to take part in elections, and instead attempted to impose a Cuban-style Communist dictatorship by force of arms. When they were defeated by the US-trained Salvadorean army and by village militias, they did participate in general elections and were soundly beaten. By then everyone knew that the Sandinistas of Nicaragua were predators and that Cuban Communism was a miserable failure.

The concentration of euphemising code here is breathtaking. The murder of 30,000 Nicaraguans by US-trained terrorists disappears behind a blithe 'by then'. And it's odd how Cuban Communism's 'failure' is clear to him at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, yet not to his powerful buddies who still insist on a crippling embargo. To them, Cuba's survival and progressive social programs appear to be an irritating success, just like Afghanistan in the 80s, whose unacceptable human rights record was an irrelevance when it was resisting the attentions of its nearest superpower. But that too is another euphemism: 'miserable failure' means 'does not allow investment opportunities'.

But back to that clean war. Another US-based scholar gives an insight to US training of Luttwak's heroic liberating armies:

In the 'fledgling democracy' that was El Salvador, teenagers as young as 13 were scooped up in sweeps of slums and refugee camps and forced to become soldiers. They were indoctrinated with rituals adopted from the Nazi SS, including brutalization and rape, to prepare them for killings that often have sexual and satanic overtones. According to [a] deserter, draftees were made to kill dogs and vultures by biting their throats and twisting off their heads, and had to watch as soldiers tortured and killed suspected dissidents - tearing out their fingernails, cutting off their heads, chopping their bodies to pieces and playing with the dismembered arms for fun.

Of course, this is not part of Luttwak's clean war itself, so how did it get on 'in the real world'?:

The results of Salvadoran military training are graphically described in the Jesuit journal America by Daniel Santiago, a Catholic priest working in El Salvador. He tells of a peasant woman who returned home one day to find her three children, her mother and her sister sitting around a table, each with its own decapitated head placed carefully on the table in front of the body, the hands arranged on top "as if each body was stroking its own head".

Not only clean, but tidy!

Literature as experience

"How can you write about life if you haven't even lived it?" asks Joseph Ridgwell.

Rather, how can you begin to write if life hasn't failed?

Writing is not about life. Writing is about the experience of distance from life, the stuff of anecdotes. In that way, writing is life.

Mi libro del año

With all the fuss about other Spanish and Spanish-speaking novelists, I want to shout the name of Enrique Vila-Matas above the din. Montano's Malady is my novel of the year so far and Words without Borders has a new review:

Vila-Matas follows, sometimes quite literally, in the footsteps of authors as various as Cervantes, Montaigne, and Musil in a bi-continental search for the purpose of literature in a shifting world that seems evermore to question the need for literature. [...] [The narrator] attempts to commune with the writers who have inspired his battle "against the enemies of the literary" and reconcile his dreams for literature with the competing limitations of his own mundane life as a writer and husband.. [...] Montano's Malady is a touching and perhaps hopeful inquiry into what it means to be a reader, or writer, in an increasingly unliterary world.