Knausgaard, Heidegger, and Literary Society

Another recent-ish Stephen Mitchelmore blog post lamented (albeit in very strong terms) the state of online literature writing, its diminishment in the face of concentration and generally dudely commentary. In the post, he reminds us of a passage from the second volume of Knausgaard's much bruited My Struggle books. Knausgaard reports having been unable to make poetry open up to him, how he felt like a fraud, judged. He goes on to present a litany of ways in which we could write about poetry in objective terms, for example about Hölderlin and his poetry.  But, "It was possible to do all of this without Hölderlin’s poems ever opening themselves up. The same could be done with all poets, and of course it has been. (Translated by Don Bartlett)".

Re-reading Knausgaard's words brought to mind for me Heidegger's essay (or series of lectures) called "The Nature of Language" (located in On the Way to Language), which somewhat randomly I had been reading at about the same time. There are numerous passages I could quote by way of illustration, but I'll go with this one:

But as for us, it must remain open whether we are capable of entering properly into this poetic experience. There is the danger that we will overstrain a poem such as this by thinking too much into it, and thereby debar ourselves from being moved by its poetry. Much greater of course--but who today would admit it?--is the danger that we will think too little, and reject the thought that the true experience with language can only be a thinking experience, all the more so because the lofty poetry of all great poetic work always vibrates within a realm of thinking. But if what matters first of all is a thinking experience with language, then why this stress on a poetic experience? Because thinking in turn goes its way in the neighborhood of poetry. It is well, therefore, to give thought to the neighbor, to him who dwells in the same neighborhood. Poetry and thought, each needs the other in its neighborhood, each in its fashion, when it comes to ultimates. In what region the neighborhood itself has its domain, each of them, thought and poetry, will define differently, but always so that they will find themselves within the same domain. But because we are caught in the prejudice nurtured through centuries that thinking is a matter of ratiocination, that is, of calculation in the widest sense, the mere talk of a neighborhood of thinking to poetry is suspect. (Translated by Peter D. Hertz)

I don't have a lot to add, beyond highlighting this convergence, in part because I'm still trying to get the Heidegger essay to open up to me. The previous sentence was written back in February when Stephen's post was still new, and in fact, I failed to finish the Heidegger essay (I'm not certain I've ever finished a Heidegger essay or chapter, come to think of it)... (and god what a portentous post-title! you should have seen what it was in the first place...)

. . . but I had wanted to say something seemingly unrelated, but which was originally prompted by this convergence. Knausgaard is interested in whether poems open themselves up to us, he is interested in ultimates, as it were, as Heidegger puts it, he is interested in the contrast between what is often said, in "objective" terms about a poem, or a poet, and what the writing actually does, or could do, to us were we awake to it. And yet Knausgaard has become a kind of literary celebrity, called on to write travelogues for the New York Times Magazine, to be a native informer in the pages of the New Yorker, to sit comfortably alongside Jonathan Franzen, happily domesticated for our consumption. I mention Franzen, because he is the quintessential literary celebrity, it seems to me, and I have frequently seen him and Knausgaard mentioned in the same breath, the same tweet, as though they were very much the same thing (highly praised white male authors who are perhaps not all that, being the general vibe). I find the yoking baffling and unpleasant and obfuscating, not least because as writers, I think they have little in common - and though I certainly much prefer Knausgaard, surely even whatever merit Franzen's writing has is utterly obscured by his weird celebrity? It pushes us away from the writing, does it not? Prevents us from allowing a work to open up to us? There is backlash: Knausgaard is dismissed, the praise is surely excessive, isn't it?, the celebrity off-putting, and what the fuck is up with that title anyway? (Though why Hitler should get to own forever two such useful words as "my struggle" is honestly beyond me. If we don't name our 3000-page pseudo-memoir-y novel series My Struggle, surely the terrorists win? Hello?) Even extra-literary criticism that I find potentially interesting and valid - would a woman writing something like My Struggle be taken so seriously? (So so seriously.) Indeed not; probably not. But even this question, just as it is (literary society is unquestionably sexist, as in fact Steve's post touches on), pushes away the writing, prevents it from opening up - we are suspicious. We are suspicious! But in such questions it is also assumed that if a woman wrote a long autobiographical novel-ish thing, that it would thereby be much like Knasugaard's, because in such terms our only mode of inquiry appears to be at the level of chatter and celebrity and ratios of recognition. The experience is placed at a distance, foreclosed. We are not open.

Tension

In "Being Jewish", from The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot addresses questions posed by Boris Pasternak: "What does being Jewish signify? Why does it exist?" He writes the following:

I believe that among all the responses there is one in three parts that we cannot avoid choosing, and it is this: it exists so the idea of exodus and the idea of exile can exist as a legitimate movement; it exists, through exile and through the initiative that is exodus, so that the experience of strangeness may affirm itself close at hand as an irreducible relation; it exists so that, by the authority of this experience, we might learn to speak.

Reflection and history enlighten us on the first point with a painful evidency. If Judaism is destined to take on meaning for us, it is indeed by showing that, at whatever time, one must be ready to set out, because to go out (to step outside) is the exigency from which one cannot escape if one wants to maintain the possibility of a just relation. The exigency of uprooting; the affirmations of nomadic truth. In this Judaism stands in contrast to paganism (all paganism). To be pagan is to be fixed, to plant oneself in the earth, as it were, to establish oneself through a pact with the permanence that authorizes sojourn and is certified by certainty in the land. Nomadism answers to a relation that possession cannot satisfy. Each time Jewish man makes a sign to us across history it is by the summons of a movement.

This passage speaks obliquely to some of what I've been trying to write about here about the problems of modernity. In a sense, Blanchot here writes against Heidegger's conception of rootedness in place, offering instead a different kind of rootedness, an opposition (between different "worlds"?). The tension between these two ideas is fascinating and crucial. The spread of capitalism has destroyed community after community. While we deplore this destruction, we also value mobility. We want the possibility of movement, but the security of stability. The more I read and the more I think about these issues, the more this tension between these competing needs and desires seems to animate much of what makes us human.

An axe to the head

In this fascinating interview (via This Space), Jill Marsden talks about coming across Nietzsche as an undergraduate, having a strong reaction from the opening pages of Beyond Good and Evil. For interviewer Christoper Bransen, also in his undergraduate years, "It was On the Genealogy of Morals, and within about two pages it felt like somebody had hit my head with an axe and opened up a new world of possibilities." At his Object-Oriented Philosophy blog, Graham Harman says of Nietzsche (by way of explaining Nietzsche's high ranking in his informal top-25 philosophers list):

Many consider him a sort of juvenile pastime that one has to move beyond, and this attitude is understandable, but just think of how your brain is on fire after reading Nietzsche. There aren’t many philosophers who can do that.

I don't mean to counter Marsden and Bransen with Harman. On the previous, now deleted, version of his blog, Harman wrote about spending his 20s reading through all of Heidegger. All of Heidegger! And now he is a published philosopher, able to engage with its history, agree, disagree, argue with it, make his own contribution, for whatever it might be worth. But again, neither is the point Graham Harman at all; I read his blog, one of many that I look at that are over my head, but I don't have a position on his positions, nor can I.

No, the point is youth and lost time. The luxuriousness of youth! It seems you're supposed to encounter philosophy when you're young. Meanwhile, I can tell you nothing of interest about my 20s--what could I possibly have been doing? not much, I assure you--and recently aged 39, I have yet to read more than a page or two of Nietzsche and have just in the last year or so been intermittently struggling with Heidegger. It strikes me that some of the difficulty I've had in reading this stuff, apart from the actual difficulty of the work itself, has to do with my habits of reading for information, for knowledge. Now that approach seems insufficient, but the reading itself seems to me more urgent than ever--for example, what I've been able to get out of Heidegger so far seems very important to me, without having to be consumed by whether what I'm getting is properly "Heideggerian" or not--it seems more urgent than ever, because of the loss of time, because of the political situation, the economic situation, the ecological situation, because of my recent fatherhood, it seems necessary to think, to think this through, to say what needs saying. So grandiose, and yet personally vital.

And I'd like to say something, perhaps in a later post, about why I feel this need right now to be reading the Greeks--didn't what Nietzsche and Heidegger had to say have a great deal to do with their readings of the Greeks? But it's not just because of them that the Greeks beckon. And yet I am not reading the Greeks, I am currently reading Thoreau. Thoreau, who some quote in support of the standard apolitical message; i.e., the writer who engages in politics is inevitably made a fool of. As if there weren't deep political implications in Thoreau, in Walden. But then this sort of stance--the extreme apolitical stance--is born, it seems to me, of a reduction of politics to pronouncements on elections, on this or that dreary politician, which is of course the reduction desired and achieved by liberal capitalism. Remove the political, reduce people to individual units, divided, but voting! And ignoring how things work, ignoring the political space. And here lately I find I am allied with Blanchot here too, and his conception of communism, and I am off running, with still more to read, more to do, more to come. . . always more to come.

Reading The Space of Literature (iv)

This series of posts came to an abrupt halt in the middle of my engagement with the opening essay, in part because of the very struggle I was having with it, which in part took me to Heidegger's Poetry, Language, Thought. And it needed quieter time than I have had, in which to both read the book and to think and take notes. But I had some moments more recently, and I return here, then, to "The Essential Solitude" after a lengthy absence. Turning the pages, I noticed that I had already marked off a passage that has direct bearing on the issues being discussed in the wake of Zadie Smith's recent essay (well, really the whole project has direct bearing, but this passage speaks to it in some of the same terms). Here is Blanchot:

The writer we call classic--at least in France--sacrifices within himself the idiom which is proper to him, but he does so in order to give voice to the universal. The calm of a regular form, the certainty of a language free from idiosyncrasy, where impersonal generality speaks, secures him a relation with truth--with truth which is beyond the person and purports to be beyond time. Then literature has the glorious solitude of reason, that rarefied life at the heart of the whole which would require resolution and courage if this reason were not in fact the stability of an ordered aristocratic society; that is, the noble satisfaction of a part of society which concentrates the whole within itself by isolating itself well above what sustains it.

When to write is to discover the interminable, the writer who enters this region does not leave himself behind in order to approach the universal. He does not move toward a surer world, a finer or better justified world where everything would be ordered according to the clarity of the impartial light of day. He does not discover the admirable language which speaks honorably for all.

The bourgeois novel, the "classic" novel, presents an ordered world, an ordered world where a universal Truth is accessible. But the writer who writes in his proper idiom does not have access to this, "does not discover the admirable language which speaks honorably for all".

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I'm going to deal very loosely with the rest of this essay. I promise nothing. Quoted passages are, as always, from the translation by Ann Smock.

Blanchot writes about the writer's journal: not a confession, not the writer's story, but an act through which the writer remembers himself. Does this mean this is how the writer grounds himself? That route by which he staves off getting lost in the dangerous solitude? Lost in the fascination?

". . .fascination is solitude's gaze. It is the gaze of the incessant and interminable."

some (dictionary) definitions:
incessant: ceaseless, ongoing, without interruption
interminable: without end; connotes "endless", tedious even; dictionary includes "monotonously or annoyingly protracted or continued; unceasing"...

So, then, there is something potentially negative about it? About this gaze, this solitude? Or is negative not quite the right word? (Meanwhile, the section under the heading The Interminable, the Incessant I return to again and again, because I don't understand it, though it includes the clarity of the excerpt presented at the top of this entry. And again I am struck by how elusive much of Blanchot can be. I struggle to retain his meaning in my head, over time. Just as I've managed, I think, to nail down a phrase, or a term, he moves on to something that seems to rely on that term or phrase, and my understanding dissipates. But then, as I have described before, in relation to Benjamin, there are those wide open spaces, like the passage above, where I find myself breathing easier. Even the elusive passages keep me coming back. Not just because I'm trying to understand it, but because something just under the surface, or rather just beyond my ken, seems real in what he is saying. I struggle the same way with Poetry, Language, Thought, in which I also sense something just around the corner, coming into view, aided, this sense, by those observations that feel so right, that tell me that it must be worth struggling with.)

Working through the rest of this opening essay, words take on new meanings. No, not new meanings, that's not right. Words used with a greater precision than usual, words taken seriously, in all their weight. (When I wrote about my problems with certain writers, I skirted this point. We are used to a lazier writing. This is perhaps the hallmark of utilitarian writing, of everyday journalistic writing--use whatever seems to work, to get the general point across, then move on--not that journalism can't be more precise than it often is. But if the general point isn't enough?) On the one hand, then, words are used with greater precision; on the other, some of these words appear to serve technical functions, are part of a technical language distinct from everyday usage (perhaps the technical language of philosophy--part of the importance of Hegel and Heidegger here, I have no doubt) (though, perhaps even some of these are instances of a precision, becoming technical in our specific encounter with them). One such word here is "fascination" or "fascinating". I use the word a lot, casually, but when I do, it rarely quite means what I mean for it to mean. I employ it as a substitute, an elegant variation, when I don't want to say interesting or brilliant or engrossing or affecting or whatever. Of course the same is largely true of those words (not that I use them exactly interchangeably).

"Seeing pre-supposes distance, decisiveness which separates . . . Seeing means that this separation has nevertheless become an encounter." The gaze: one doesn't touch but is held by the gaze, this holding is a contact.

"What is given us by this contact at a distance is the image, and fascination is passion for the image." I catch myself lost in a gaze, fascinated by something, time seems to stop. Better: I watch my daughter, staring, the absorbed look in her eyes, but it's less a stare than a gaze (they talk of mother and nursing baby gazing into each others' eyes); she is fascinated, and though she may smile, it's usually not in the moment--not as she gazes--the smile interrupts the gaze, punctuates it. Interestingly, Blanchot calls childhood "the moment of fascination":

Perhaps the force of the maternal figure receives its intensity from the very force of fascination, and one might say then, that if the mother exerts this fascinating attraction it is because, appearing when the child lives altogether in fascination's gaze, she concentrates in herself all the powers of enchantment. It is because the child is fascinated that the mother is fascinating, and that is also why all the impressions of early childhood have a kind of fixity which comes from fascination.

Ok, time to finish up this round. I've taken some incoherent stabs at different parts of this essay. And clearly this essay leads into the next ("Approaching Literature's Space"), and so on. (And as Blanchot remarks in a note in the front of the book, the whole thing revolves around the center that is the essay "Orpheus' Gaze".) So it's perhaps a mistake to draw any conclusions from just the one essay. I note for now some recurring words: interminable, incessant, fascination, gaze, time's absence, solitude (of course). "To write is to enter into the affirmation of the solitude in which fascination threatens. It is to surrender to the risk of time's absence, where eternal starting over reigns." Why? He leaves the question open, at least for now . . . but what does this mean? Threatens? This sounds as though fascination is dangerous for the would-be writer. Again a negative connotation. No peaceful process, writing. Perhaps it starts to come together here: Writing is a risk. For the writer to write what is properly his or her to write, without an eye on so-called universal truths, the writer must be willing to take risks, willing to risk being lost in fascination. In the space where this fascination looms, this is where the writer enters, surrenders. . .

Authentic

Heidegger speaks of "the basic Greek experience of the Being of beings in the sense of presence" and how "Roman thought takes over the Greek words [corresponding to that experience] without a corresponding, equally authentic experience of what they say, without the Greek word". If the "rootlessness of Western thought begins" here, what might this mean? If the reference to the authentic experience is debased and misused down the centuries, the further we get from the source, what is the source? What does it mean? Is it because we're to understand the Greeks as the height of Western civilization, from which all else necessarily falls away? (Just as it is sometimes said that Plato "is" philosophy and the rest of philosophy merely a series of footnotes and marginalia?) No, it is perhaps because the Greeks are still within living memory of a time before civilization, before the conquest. Their concepts and experiences are still in touch with the authentic, the natural. Already, Plato is suspicious of this, suspicious of Homer, suspicious of living tradition. Consider the acknowledgement, the apologetics, in the Greeks, that civilization requires slavery, requires forceable extraction, requires this kind of violence. We resist this, but it's true. Each successive expansion forced, and forces, more and more people into a certain way of life, the maintenance of which has requried, and still requires, force and propaganda. Ultimately, we are starved of options, bereft of choices. But they knew what it was to be free, or at least knew people who knew what it was to be free.

I come out of a way of thinking in which I am conditioned to be wary of the authentic, or rather, appeals to authenticity. Perhaps we rightly mock the Authenticity Police--for example, in pop music (all those tired tropes of the authentic singer who writes his own autobiographical songs). And yet this is not quite the same thing. I notice a literature depicting a striving for the authentic, perhaps a signal characteristic of Modernism. Recall Tom McCarthy's Remainder. The narrator is obsessed with isolating those moments when he feels most alive, the truly authentic moments of existence. Of course, he's suffered a head wound and seems as if he may be insane. But what if we're the insane ones and he's finally become sane? He's finally able to see the inauthenticness of his life, our lives. In book after book, Thomas Bernhard's narrators rail against the absurdity of life. Bernhard himself is reported to have said, upon receiving a literary award, "Everything is absurd when one thinks of death." And, given that we die anyway, all of our striving, all of our expended effort, seems absurd. What's the point? But Bernhard's narrators rail most often against frauds, phonies, philistines, petty bourgeoisie, institutions--schools, hospitals, museums, the church, the state--all the accumulated, structured apparatus of civilization. What if they, these narrators, simply want to be left alone--not by themselves, literally, but free, free to live authentically in the world? What if they want to escape? Not necessarily from any society, but from the insanity of this society? What if they know they can't? What if they sense something that is unachievable because it's already been destroyed?

Rootlessness of Western Thought

Just one thread I attempted to follow in this post, before I decided to reign myself in and spread things out over multiple posts, has to do with Heidegger's ideas about the Greeks, at least as they appear in Poetry, Language, Thought. In the essay "The Origin of the Work of Art", he tries to get to "the thingness of the thing". In the course of doing so, he goes over the ways in which we normally think of a thing, for example its properties or physical characteristics (hard, soft, heavy, light, rough, smooth, etc). But:

What are we thinking of when we now have the thing in mind? Obviously a thing is not merely an aggregate of traits, nor an accumulation of properties by which that aggregate arises. A thing, as everyone thinks he knows, is that around which the properties have assembled. We speak in this connection of the core of things. The Greeks are supposed to have called it to hupokeimenon. For them, this core of the thing was something lying at the ground of the thing, something always already there. The characteristics, however, are called ta sumbebekota, that which has always turned up already along with the given core and occurs along with it.

These designations are no arbitrary names. Something that lies beyond the purview of this essay speaks in them, the basic Greek experience of the Being of beings in the sense of presence. It is by these determinations, however, that the interpretation of the thingness of the thing is established which henceforth becomes standard, and the Western interpretation of the Being of beings stabilized. The process begins with the appropriation of Greek words by Roman-Latin thought. Hupokeimenon becomes subiectum; hupostasis becomes substantia; sumbebekos becomes accidens. However, this translation of Greek names into Latin is in no way the innocent process it is considered to this day. Beneath the seemingly literal and thus faithful translation there is concealed, rather, a translation of Greek experience into a different way of thinking. Roman thought takes over the Greek words without a corresponding, equally authentic experience of what they say, without the Greek word. The rootlessness of Western thought begins with this translation. (All italics in the original; translation by Albert Hofstadter.)

This idea fascinates me, and I will be returning to it here. (As I will to the more difficult language--the thingness of the thing, the Being of beings, etc. But one thing at a time, please.)

Wake Up

In Everyday Blessings, the book about mindful parenting which I mentioned previously, there is a chapter called "Live-In Zen Masters". In it, co-author Jon Kabat-Zinn talks some about his Zen training: "It's all about mindfulness and non-attachment, knowing who we are at the deepest levels, and knowing what we are doing, which paradoxically includes both not knowing and non-doing." He compares Zen training to parenting: "They both appeared to be about waking up to life itself. . ." and sees babies as akin to "live-in Zen Masters":

Zen Masters don't explain themselves. They just embody presence. They don't get hung up in thinking, or lost in theoretical musings about this or that. They are not attached to things being a certain way. They are not always consistent. One day does not necessarily have to be like the next. Their presence and their teachings can help us break through to a direct experiencing of our own true nature, and encourage us to find our own way, now, in this moment. They do this, not by telling us how, but by giving us endless challenges that cannot be resolved through thinking, by mirroring life back to us in its fullness, by pointing to wholeness. More than anything Zen Masters embody wakefulness and call it out of us.

Children are similar in many ways, especially when they are babies. The older they get, the harder it may be for us to see it. But their true nature is always present, and always mirroring our own, if we are willing to look, and to see.

Children have what might be called "original mind"--open, pure, unencumbered. They are undeniably and totally present. They are constantly learning, developing, changing, and requiring new responses from us. As they grow, they seem to challenge every place that we might be holding an expectation, a fixed opinion, a cherished belief, a desire for things to be a certain way. As babies, they so fill our lives and require so much attention to their physical and emotional needs that they continually challenge us to be present totally, to be sensitive, to inquire into what is actually happening, to risk trying something, and to learn from their responses to our attempts. They teach us how to be attuned to them, and to find joy and harmony in our connectedness with them. There is little time for theory, and it doesn't seem to help much anyway unless it is connected to practice.

Of course, children are not really Zen Masters. Children are children and Zen Masters are Zen Masters. But if we are able to look at our children with openness and receptivity, and see the purity of life expressing itself through them, at any age, it can wake us up at any moment to their true nature and to our own.

I read this passage last night, and a few things struck me about it. For one thing, the language about "knowing" and "not knowing and non-doing" reminds me specifically of Thomas Merton's essay titled "Love and Solitude", collected in Love and Living, an essay I had particular trouble with. Here, for example, is the opening paragraph of "Love and Solitude":

No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees. These pages seek nothing more than to echo the silence and the peace that is "heard" when the rain wanders freely among the hills and forests. But what can the wind say where there is no hearer? There is then a deeper silence: the silence in which the Hearer is No-Hearer. That deeper silence must be heard before one can speak truly of solitude.

I remember having trouble with this essay and that it reminded me of those kinds of writing that have given me the most difficulty--the kind of writing I've been struggling with recently, for example writing by Blanchot and Heidegger. It strikes me now, in copying out the passage above, that another pass at this Merton essay may be helpful to understanding Blanchot's "essential solitude". And words in the Kabat-Zinn passage, words like "fullness" and "presence" and "wake us up", also remind me of Blanchot and Heidegger (in my admittedly limited experience with each).

Of course, many people in the West have been drawn to Eastern traditions, such as Zen Buddhism, because they are dissatisfied with the spiritual life of the West. The West is often seen as spiritually bereft, as overly analytical or "rational", and so on. I'm sympathetic to this charge, though I am neither inclined nor prepared to enter into a detailed treatment of the topic in this space. As someone about to become a father, I am thus far persuaded that there is great wisdom in the approach to parenting described in Everyday Blessings (how well I will do it remains to be seen). What interests me here, however, are the ways in which the language at times reminds me of that language used in the writing I find difficult (but which in this context I do not find difficult), and what that might tell us about the philosophical and literary project of these writers--which matters to me because of how I conceive of its importance in the grand scheme of living in the modern world, including the ongoing project of living my own life, and the importance of art, literature in particular.

It seems to me that, among the reasons Blanchot and Heidegger are difficult, is that they are writing about ideas and concepts for which we lack either the sufficient vocabulary or the sufficient kinds of experience, or vocabulary for noting experiences, which perhaps amounts to much the same thing. It could be that we lack the vocabulary because we have been, for centuries, falsely employing concepts carelessly borrowed from our ancient predecessors. And it could be that the vocabulary we do use is confusing because it is unable to properly express the concepts under discussion (much as, in English, we lack a word sufficient to express the French jouissance).

I know I've made some claims that are both vague and grandiose, but I hope to be able to make at least some headway in future posts in articulating what I mean, along the way towards my understanding of it myself. I'll finish by saying that I hope it will become clearer why I insist on writing posts that are about some combination of babies and writing and philosophy and politics, and why most of those posts that seem unconnected are in fact connected, and in certain ways about the same thing.