"Any hack could instruct him in the elements of his craft"

Just read Hugh Kenner's short but rich Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians. There is much to chew on here, in many ways very complementary with Josipovici, I find. There is also much I'd like to excerpt, in the entirely possible event I am unable to blog about the book in any detail, but for now, this:

Art is the perfect not-doing of what cannot be done, and peer as we will, we shall not discern Beckett doing. We are encumbered by no proof sheets, no keys, no outlines. There is no legend of the fabulous artificer. Not even the Paris telephone directory records his presence, though it did Joyce's. Photographs display the somewhat bemused expression of a man to whom numerous books have mysteriously happened. We do not track theme-words through the text of Comment C'est or Happy Days [as one does through Ulysses, for example - RC], marveling at the master's virtuosity. On the contrary, we note the stubborn (though fastidious) repetitiousness of a man who can barely keep going ("end at last of the second part how it was with Pim now only the third and last how it was after Pim before Bom how it is there is how it was with Pim"). His role is not the engineer's but the scribe's, or the medium's ("I say it as I hear it"). Any hack could instruct him in the elements of his craft, though it is not clear whether he would profit by instruction, for his virtuosity, such as it is, appears to diminish rather than grow accomplished. The early Murphy is at least something like a novel. It has even a timetable, and one would have expected practice to increase its author's facility. Five novels later, alas, he seems unable to punctuate a sentence, let alone construct one. More and more deeply he penetrates the heart of utter incompetence, where the simplest pieces, the merest three-word sentences, fly apart in his hands. He is the non-maestro, the anti-virtuoso, habitue of non-form and anti-matter, Euclid of the dark zone where all signs are negative, the comedian of utter disaster.

The very notion of wholeness

Of Kafka's story fragment "The Watchman", mentioned in the last post, Gabriel Josipovici also writes: "It is only a fragment in the way an aphorism is a fragment, that is, as a questioning of the very notion of wholeness." What does he mean?

In a short discussion over at Jacob Russell's blog, I echoed something I wrote in an earlier post. I said: "My sense of Modernism, before reading Josipovici, was that it was simply this moment in time in which new techniques expanded (or advanced) the modes available to writers. Since reading Josipovici, most references I see to Modernism appear to be based on the same conception." Jacob replied that "[n]ew techniques were more than a reaction to old techniques: they were reactions to modes of perception, to ways of conceptualizing the world" and that it seems that Josipovici is less "concerned with techniques in themselves, [than] with the broader agenda they were meant to serve". I've been a little uneasy diving into discussions about literary Modernism, primarily because my reading in the critical literature has been so shallow, outside of Josipovici. And yet, his work has struck such a chord with me, that I feel compelled to step into the fray, with him as my primary guide.

To return to this question of wholeness, I want to talk a little about Josipovici's take on James Joyce. Joyce, it seems to me, is for many people the quintessential Modernist. This is how I had viewed him in the past, and it was because of this view that I saw the Modernists as a whole as a particularly difficult group of writers. I was thus surprised and intrigued when I noticed, well over a year ago by now, a comment from Steve Mitchelmore (I don't remember whether it appeared at This Space or in comments elsewhere) to the effect that Ulysses was less the greatest 20th century novel (its customary panel-selected position) than the last great 19th century novel. If I looked at the idea long enough, I could almost feel as if I understood what he meant, though I'd yet to read Ulysses (and, in fact, have still not read it). Steve made a similar comment at least one other time, specifically referencing Josipovici. When I'd read Josipovici's On Trust, I had a better idea what might be meant by this idea, but he doesn't spend any time on Joyce in that book.

Recently, I asked Steve if there was an essay in which Josipovici writes specifically about Joyce. He referred me to an older collection, The Mirror of Criticism: Selected Reviews 1977-1982. I promptly found the book for cheap online. The piece in question is titled, ironically enough, "The Last Great Book". In retrospect, it's a good thing that I wasn't hoping for a lengthy essay or interested in the book only for this piece. The review is only a few pages long and doesn't say a whole lot more than what Steve had already said (happily, the rest of reviews in the book are well worth reading). But there are some choice lines worth attending to. One of the books under discussion is Hugh Kenner's fine study, Joyce's Voices--which Josipovici calls "criticism of a very high order":

Nevertheless, a doubt remains. Not about Kenner, but about Joyce. No objective style, Kenner rightly insists, can be said to exist; no truth can be discovered by aligning so many words to so many things; every attempt to simulate such a Truth will, as in the case of Hemingway, itself quickly become a 'style'. 'The True Sentence, in Joyce's opinion, had best settle for being true to the voice that utters it.' Yet what Kenner fails to see is that in the end Joyce does, against his own deepest insights, cling to one unquestioned Truth, that of the complete work. If there is no True Sentence, then why is there a True Work? This, it seems to me, is a major weakness of Joyce, his refusal to recognise the vulnerability of the Muse, his insistence, against the evidence, that to make a book is itself a valuable activity.

Compared with Proust and Beckett, Kafka and Eliot and Virginia Woolf, Joyce presents a strangely rigid attitude; he refuses ever to let go, to trust the work to take him where it will. Every 'letting go' has to be carefully fitted into its place in the overall design, even though there is no longer, by his own admission, any authority for the pattern the design itself assumes.

[. . .] there is ultimately something cosy and safe about Ulysses: underlying it is the belief that the mere accumulation of detail and complexity is an unquestioned good. Far from being 'the decisive English-language book of the [twentieth] century,' as Kenner suggests, it is perhaps the last great book of the nineteenth.

Whereas we seem most often to be concerned with new techniques established by the Modernists writers, especially if we buy into progress, into advancement of the arts, here the techniques themselves are of less concern. I realize that this is one of the reasons why Ulysses has seemed so forbidding. Perhaps I get on better with the more exploratory, less domineering fiction of Proust, Beckett, Kafka, and now Woolf.

If we return to Kafka's fragment, we see ourselves, we overrun it, return to it. "It opens a space and lives in it, a space which we too can enter and in which we too can live. . ." So writes Josipovici, again in his introduction to the Collected Stories (itself collected, as "Kafka's Children", in The Singer on the Shore), in language recalling his remarkable essays about the Bible, including The Book of God itself. In the 19th century novel, the novelist takes over from God, controlling his or her created world, without doubting the justification for this move.

In the short piece on Joyce, Josipovici is reviewing what are, in effect, "reader's guides" to Joyce's writing. Such guides abound, of course, and point to another factor keeping Ulysses at arm's length for me. As Josipovici puts it, Joyce's "works cry out for explication, footnoting and the exercise of those crossword puzzle skills at which the academic mind excels." This, he suggests, is indicative of a weakness in Joyce's art. With Joyce acting as God, academics serve as the priests and Talmudists explaining and interpreting his every word. With this in mind, the first sentence of Josipovici's review is hilariously apt: "If Joyce had not existed the professors would have had to invent him."

Notes on Early Beckett and Waiting for Godot

[The following is condensed from two posts begun last year, closer to when I actually read Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Watt, and Mercier and Camier. I think I had larger purposes in mind when I began the posts, but was unable to find the time to do anything further with them. I'm posting it here in part because they seem related to my recent entries. The words have been modified and updated for clarity, though it necessarily remains more scattershot and unfinished than I would like.]

Imagining Samuel Beckett to be a particularly difficult writer, I'd long delayed my reading of him. Then a couple of years ago, I eagerly snapped up a used copy of A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett by Hugh Kenner. I expected I would begin reading Beckett soon and wanted some company. I began at the beginning, with Murphy. I always like to begin at the beginning, when I can. Beckett at this time may have still been in thrall to Joyce's influence, as I've seen said a few places, but I enjoyed the novel. I love its famous opening line: "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new." Like I said, I love the line, though I can see what might be overly precious about it, overly poetic. In any event, I found Murphy by turns hilarious and bewildering. Part of my bewilderment, I'm sure, stemmed from my unconscious insistence that the world of the book conform to the world outside the book. Beckett will have none of this. Here is Kenner on this point:

A novel, in short, is a novel, not a map of the familiar world, and Beckett's novels differ from most in the consistency of their insistence upon this principle. If God wrote the script of the familiar world, he laid down also the principles that govern in it the possible and the impossible. Beckett's covert suggestion appears to be that these principles are as arbitrary as the rules of chess, which likewise state what is possible and impossible.

"Arbitrary": this word jumps out at me these days, very likely because of the influence of Gabriel Josipovici (other words jumping out at me lately: "certainty"; "trust"; "tradition"; "faith").

Again Kenner: "Clearly the author of Murphy had insufficient faith in 'the novel' to return to that form with any ambition of improving his management of it."

I think it was my bewilderment with parts of Murphy that held me back, along with what I still perceived as Beckett's "difficulty". But, more than a year after reading Murphy, in the wake of reading Josipovici's On Trust, I decided it was time to get on with reading Beckett. So, I decided to read Kenner's book from the beginning. I'd noticed that the first chapter is about Waiting for Godot. Finally reading the introduction in full, I learned why:

. . . Beckett was a long time finding his way, and beginning at the beginning is a mistake. To make anything at all of his earlier work one needs to sense the quality of his mature imaginings. Fortunately, there is a sanctioned place to begin. Nearly everyone encounters Beckett through Waiting for Godot, so my commentary does the same.

Ok, so beginning at the beginning is a mistake. I can see that. If a writer took a while to get going, his or her early work could put a reader off from tackling the good stuff. Fortunately, Murphy is entertaining enough, though it's evident that it wasn't quite what Beckett was about. So, on Kenner's advice, I read Waiting for Godot. As ever, it's strange reading a play. We forget to remember that the words are meant to be performed on a stage. The temptation to read the words too quickly is strong. And reading the actor instructions is not the same as seeing an actor following them (assuming the actor manages to follow them correctly). And the play is so famous that the temptation to look for significance is strong. Yet Kenner compares the play's Vladimir and Estragon to Laurel & Hardy, which seems to undercut that temptation. Though he also notes the similarity of the play's setting to occupied France under the Germans, the waiting in the play to that waiting that must have been endured by Resistance operatives:

Here is perhaps the playwright's most remarkable feat. There existed, throughout a whole country for five years, a literal situation that corresponded point by point with the situation in this play, and was so far from special that millions of lives were saturated in its desperate reagents, and no spectator ever thinks of it. Instead the play is ascribed to one man’s gloomy view of life, which is like crediting him with having invented a good deal of modern history.

He is not, of course, suggesting the play is about the Resistance. In fact, he specifically argues against the tendency to make it be about anything larger than what it is: a play, that is, about waiting.

Readers of this blog may have noticed that for months now I've quoted a line from Waiting for Godot at the top of the blog: "Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today?" It's the kind of line that, taken out of context, seems to say something about our complicity in the world, especially the complicity of those of us living relatively well, while others suffer. I say this, knowing that it's perhaps not right to quote such a line from this play in this way, and yet the line appeals to me, speaks to me, so I take it and use it for my own purposes.

Incidentally, the short novel Mercier and Camier, which I also read last year, and which was written in French in 1946, soon after Watt, but not published until 1970, very much seems to me to be a rough draft of sorts for Waiting for Godot. You have the same sort of Laurel & Hardy-ish banter, this time in service not of waiting, but of planning a sort of journey, that never quite comes off.

Bullying the Reader

My last post reminded me of the final paragraph from Hugh Kenner's chapter on Watt, in his A Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett. But before I present that, let me give some background. In the chapter, Kenner is discussing the uncertainty of the narrative of Watt, its "provisional" nature. If you've read Watt, you will recall that we encounter several instances of extremely detailed uncertainty. Watt cannot be sure about anything, and Sam, the narrator, who gets most, but not all, of his information from Watt, can only be as sure as Watt is about those things that Watt tells him. For example, Watt approaches Mr. Knott's house, where he is to be employed. The house is dark, and Watt goes from the front to the back door, and back again, finding both locked, until finally the back door is unlocked:

Watt was surprised to find the back door, so lately locked, now open. Two explanations of this occurred to him. The first was this, that his science of the locked door, so seldom at fault, had been so on this occasion, and that the back door, when he had found it locked, had not been locked, but open. And the second was this, that the back door, when he had found it locked, had in effect been locked, but had subsequently been opened, from within, or without, by some person, while he Watt had been employed in going, to and fro, from the back door to the front door, and from the front door to the back door.

Of these two explanations Watt thought he preferred the latter, as being the more beautiful. For if someone had opened the back door, from within, or without, would not he Watt have seen a light, or heard a sound? Or had the door been unlocked, from within, in the dark, by some person perfectly familiar with the premises, and wearing carpet slippers, or in his stockinged feet? Or, from without, by some person so skilful on his legs, that his footfalls made no sound? Or had a sound been made, a light shown, and Watt not heard the one nor seen the other?

The result of this was that Watt never knew how he got into Mr. Knott's house. He knew that he got in by the back door, but he was never to know, never, never to know, how the back door came to be opened. And if the back door had never opened, but remained shut, then who knows Watt had never got into Mr. Knott's house at all, but turned away, and returned to the station, and caught the first train back to town. Unless he had got in through a window.

I copied out this passage without remembering and before noticing again that Kenner had used most of the same passage as "characteristic of the narrative movement" in the novel. Indeed, elsewhere, for another example, we learn about the food that is prepared for Mr. Knott, the leftovers of which, when there are any, are given to "the dog", and there follows an elaboration on various possible permutations and historical conditions that occurred to Watt surrounding the preparation of the food, and availability of the dog, and the history of the dog's (or dogs') handlers, who may or may not be the Lynch family, about whom we learn all kinds of extenuating details as well. And this goes on for some 20 pages. Not that by the end of these pages Watt has necessarily exhausted the possibilities, but he has perhaps settled the question to his necessary satisfaction:

But it did not last long, this concern of Watt's, not very long, as such concerns go. And yet it was a major concern, of that period, while it lasted. But once Watt had grasped, in its complexity, the mechanism of this arrangement, how the food came to be left, and the dog to be available, and the two to be united, then it interested him no more, and he enjoyed a comparative peace of mind, in this connexion. Not that for a moment Watt supposed that he had penetrated the forces at play, in this particular instance, or even perceived the forms that they upheaved, or obtained the least useful information concerning himself, or Mr. Knott, for he did not. But he had turned, little by little, a disturbance into words, he had made a pillow of old words, for a head. Little by little, and not without labour.

In just this sense, perhaps the narrative can be permitted to move on, sufficient attention having perhaps been given to these matters. These passages, this scrupulous attention detail, are amusing, at times quite funny, and rhythmic, often fun to read, though at times tiring. I found it helpful to read portions of the novel aloud, though the symmetry of the paragraphs, the rhythmic flow of the details, at times allowed the sense of the words to evade my understanding.

Anyway, Josipovici in On Trust had alerted me to the narrative issues that faced the Modernists, that the certainty, the narrative control, of the 19th century novel was a problem for writers like Kafka, Proust, Beckett. And as I read Kenner's Reader's Guide, I found myself in familiar territory. Beckett would not, could not, simply write a traditional novel. With reference to Watt and these precise, detailed lists of things that didn't happen, he says, "[so] many trivia are entoiled in such uncertainty that the author cannot make with any confidence the simplest narrative gesture. And being scrupulous, he itemizes the possibilities: so much can language do, and the mind do." And so, Kenner closes his chapter on Watt thus:

The book chokes, therefore, slowly, on its own internal elaborations, redeemed however--this is nicely calculated--by the ceremony, the rhythm, in short the great formal beauty of all those gentle scrupulous sentences. Provisionality, from being a point of epistemology, becomes almost a point of etiquette, as though to affirm anything at all--to affirm that Watt passed through a door--would be a discourtesy to the reader, a bullying. Sam, the narrator of Watt, though we know him only by the manners of his prose, is excellent company, agreeable, unintimidating. Watt is like a rope of sand, dissolving before our eyes as it is narrated, but Sam is never ruffled, never ruffled.

Experience Only Words

Hugh Kenner, in his introduction to his A Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett, providing some background to the idea that Beckett, in his prose fiction, "became our time's inheritor from Flaubert.":

The Flaubertian Revolution was, we know, a matter of style, of the nuanced cadence and le most juste. It was also a revolution of theme, for after Madame Bovary the theme of fiction after fiction proved to be illusion. Madame Bovary is about Emma Bovary's notion that successive men--Charles, Leon, Rodolphe--offer the vast emotional opportunities to which she feels entitled. She acquired her sense of entitlement from such sources as novels, so Flaubert's novel is like the novels she has read, from the marriage and the obligatory adulteries to the theatrical death; like them, but written as they are not; composed, sentence by sentence, with a double vision, a simultaneous awareness of her illusion and of the realities, barely perceived by her, out of which the illusion is spun. That is why the style is so important; each sentence must walk that tightrope, making Leon simultaneously the not unusual young clerk, in our vision, and the sensitive lover, in hers. Thereafter we encounter a whole fictional tradition of people who live inside stories. Joyce, in Dubliners, presents person after person enclosed in some received fiction, the men and women around them virtually transformed into figments. When Gretta Conroy, in the [sic] 'The Dead', says of the young man who died, 'I think he died for me', she is placing him inside a story that shall obliterate the commonplace fact that he died of having stood in the rain, and that ficiton of hers has more power over her passions than has the living husband from whom she turns away.

The novels of the Flaubertian tradition have tempted playwrights and film-makers, but have never made successful plays or films. The Great Gatsby for instance--how shall Jay Gatsby be impersonated by some actor? For he is incarnate illusion, the collective dream of all the other characters. Such a being abides in fiction, where he is created by figures of consummate rhetoric in a medium whose very condition must be that we shall see nothing, shall experience only words.

So fiction, since Flaubert created the fiction of solipsism, has turned away from the visible and the palpable: from the stage, from the film...