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.

"We'd now be living in a different world"

Early in Karl Ove Knausgaard's A Time for Everything (my post about the book is here), but after we've learned of Antinous Bellori's encounter with the angels and briefly of his own investigations, is this tantalizing passage:

And what was the legend of Faust warning against, if not the activities of Copernicus, Bruno, Descartes, Galileo, Leibniz, and Newton? We don't normally see it this way because of the impressively effective operation that was mounted during the Enlightenment, when demonic was the label attached to the obscure and the vague, the speculative and the occult, and truthful to the precise and rational, obvious and provable, with all the fateful consequences that would entail.

Because darkness isn't the danger, light is. That is where all the pitfalls are to be found.

Antinous Bellori's name is on the whole remarkable for its absence in such contexts, something that at first glance isn't in the least bit strange, considering the subjects that preoccupied him. It seems a long way from Newton's books on optics and gravity to Bellori's work on angels. But if we put what they wrote about to one side, and concentrate instead on the underlying mentality and philosophy, we will discover that the similarities outnumber the differences. Bellori employed the same methods as the others, he'd read the same literature and possessed the same knowledge. The only thing that distinguished him from them was that he looked in a different direction. That the secret into which he'd thereby gained insight would never be recognized was something of which he was ignorant, just as  the other movers of the age hadn't the slightest inkling of the consequences of their own discoveries. They lived in a period suspended between two contrasting views of the world and, like hermit crabs changing shells, were quite naked and vulnerable, always alert, always on the brink of scampering back to the old shell, until they'd crossed the invisible line and the new shell lay closer, after which they simply had to keep pushing on. The openness, fluidity, and uncertainty of the moment is there in Baroque art alongside a fascination with infinity and fixation on death. But the choice was made, the world's new boundaries were laid, and everything that was outside them sank slowly into oblivion. And rightly so, we might cry today, for Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton were right! After all, the ideas of Paracelsus, Landmark, and Bellori are monstrous, unscientific, superstitious. But if we remember that these writings date from the very start of the Enlightenment, before the new world philosophy was determined, it may be easier to see that such channels of thought represented an alternative to the road that was chosen, the one that has brought us to where we are today, and that it's precisely this choice that makes the ideas in, for example, On the Nature of Angels seem so outlandish and unfashionable. They weren't then. And therein lies the enticing point: what if Bellori's ideas had won through, and Newton's had sunk into oblivion?

We'd now be living in a different world.

Notes on A Time for Everything

Though I loved the first volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's novel/memoir My Struggle, I wasn't sure if I was going to read his novel, A Time for Everything (translated from the Norwegian by James Anderson). After all, it's about angels, isn't it? And isn't it a bit of a historical novel? Yes, yes, both of these things are true. And yet, A Time for Everything turns out to be an astonishingly good novel.

On the very first page we read that "our world is only one of many possible worlds". The second page plunges us into an account of 11 year-old Antinous Bellori's 1554 encounter with two angels after a day of fishing. Bellori's day is recounted in what feels like moment-by-moment naturalistic loving detail, reading in parts almost like Thoreau. Angels become an obsession for him, and he ultimately writes his study, On the Nature of Angels. Our narrator tracks Bellori's studies, his questions as to the nature of the divine, his similarity to figures such as Newton, essays interesting and relevant questions about the nature of science - paths not taken and other possible worlds loom large here  - and anxieties about the value of the written word. All of this is endlessly fascinating, and it is not at all surprising that I would be interested in it, given the various threads I have pursued on this blog.

However, the bulk of the novel is devoted to psychologically detailed stories concerning Biblical figures, almost back stories, if you will, for such central stories as those of Cain and Abel, Noah and the Flood, the prophecies of Ezekial, Lot and the destruction of Sodom, the death of Christ. The nature of the angels, and by extension the divine, is further explored through their presence and role in each of these stories. And these narratives could almost be described as one would describe a fat historical novel about real historical people. I would not have expected to want to read such a thing. Put like that it frankly sounds somewhat dreary. Occasionally, too, Knausgaard's prose goes slack (as indeed it does at times in My Struggle). And yet I found these stories just as endlessly fascinating as the narrator's essays, if not more so. How is this?

This passage from Stephen Mitchelmore's review (which you should read) about this, including the prose (which he allowed was "vulnerable to criticism for stamping out generic passages from a stencil") suggests a possible reason:

Yet such prose in the context of biblical stories has the odd effect of naturalising events we would otherwise place at a distance. When Abel announces an expedition to the Garden of Eden, it is as supernatural as the North Pole. And when he is attacked by angels resisting his approach, they may as well be polar bears. Reading the novel late into the night I wondered if this is what genre fans enjoy in large volumes of speculative fiction, science fiction and fantasy: imaginary worlds presented in unadorned prose to evoke – albeit temporarily – an enchantment of the current, prosaic one. But the worlds and ideas they generate are weightless in comparison to this: our culture is founded on Bible stories. Every event becomes vitally real to us as they were for generations of Jews and Christians.

The speculation about science fiction is worth considering, but I love the point that the apparently flat "readable" prose "naturalizes" these stories for us. In any event, I was riveted throughout. The story of the Flood, for one, is terrifying and devastating. I also enjoyed how Knausgaard, or his narrator, seems gleefully unconcerned with anachronism in these Biblical stories, with respect to geography (e.g., fjords) and technology (guns); the scientific wave of the hand in which these are casually explained away is brilliant.

The story of Bellori's solitary life and his investigations is so convincing that it did not occur to me till rather late in the novel to doubt that he actually existed (he did not). The short coda turns to the narrator, and his father, and is somewhat puzzling as to its relationship to the novel, yet it appears to point us toward the writing of My Struggle. In my remarks and comments elsewhere about this book, I keep reaching for superlatives such as astonishing, remarkable, and so on, but it really was like no other book I've ever read.

Noted: Karl Ove Knausgaard

This passage comes from volume one of Karl Ove Knausgaard's novel/memoir, My Struggle (translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett):

Looking back on this, it is striking how she, scarcely two years old, could have such an effect on our lives. Because she did, for a while that was all that mattered. Of course, that says nothing about her, but everything about us. Both Linda and I live on the brink of chaos, or with the feeling of chaos, everything can fall apart at any moment and we have to force ourselves to come to terms with the demands of a life with small children. We do not plan. Having to shop for dinner comes as a surprise every day. Likewise, having to pay bills at the end of every month. […] However, this constant improvisation increases the significance of the moment, which of course then becomes extremely eventful since nothing about it is automatic and, if our lives feel good, which naturally they do at times, there is a great sense of togetherness and a correspondingly intense happiness. Oh, how we beam. All the children are full of life and are instinctively drawn to happiness, so that gives you extra energy and you are nice to them and they forget their defiance or anger in seconds. The corrosive part of course is the awareness that being nice to them is not of the slightest help when I am in the thick of it, dragged down into a quagmire of tears and frustration. And once in the quagmire each further action only serves to plunge me deeper. And at least as corrosive is the awareness that I am dealing with children. That it is children who are dragging me down. There is something deeply shameful about this. In such situations I am probably as far from the person I aspire to be as possible. I didn't have the faintest notion about any of this before I had children. I thought that everything would be fine so long as I was kind to them. And that is actually more or less how it is, but nothing I had previously experienced warned me about the invasion into your life that having children entails. The immense intimacy you have with them, the way in which your own temperament and mood are, so to speak, woven into theirs, such that your own worst sides are no longer something you can keep to yourself, hidden, but seem to take shape outside you and are then hurled back. The same of course applies to your best sides. . . (pp. 36-37)

Noted: Karl Ove Knausgaard

In Karl Ove Knausgaard's remarkable novel, A Time For Everything (translated from the Norwegian by James Anderson), this passage comes from the novella-length section about Noah and the flood:

Milka had borne him. She'd known him since before he'd been born, his movements, the small habits that had formed while he lay floating within her, she had looked forward to his coming, and when he had come, he'd been just as she'd expected. Not in appearance, but in the atmosphere he brought with him. Perhaps it had something to with the way he'd looked at her the first time? Perhaps it was something about the way he'd crawled, still bloody and slimy, toward her breast? For months after the birth he'd been part of her, it had just been the two of them, nothing else existed, and even after that first time was over, and he slipped into the rhythm and life of the family, he was part of her. She knew his body as well as she knew her own. She washed him every day, she held him close every day, there wasn't an inch of his body her hands hadn't touched. When he raised his head for the first time, she'd been there, when he crawled for the first time, she'd been there, when he said his first word, she'd been there. All this had been stored within her. That was where he was. The smell of him, the taste of him, the feel of his skin against hers. Barak was a part of her, and when he died, a part of her died. Not in a figurative sense. Her body asked for Barak, it asked for Barak all the time, but it no longer got any answer.

For her it was no good throwing away everything to do with Barak, as his father had begun to do. For some reason this knowledge made her sorrow easier. There was comfort in knowing that, that the sorrow would never leave her. That it would always be with her.

Where did it all go? Fiction and blogging and favorite books

I've had occasion recently to read through some of this blog's six-plus years of archives. Turns out I used to write about literature! Quite frequently! Ha! It's difficult to imagine having actually written some of those posts—when did I have the time, the energy? When was I thinking about that stuff? Where did it all go? In any case, reading some of those older posts, reading recent blog- and other online sources, engaging in some enjoyable off-blog literary conversations, and, oh yeah, reading a bunch of good fiction, have all helped reinvigorate me just a little bit, to remind me of some of what I might have forgotten. I'm hopeful to get things moving here. Well, hopeful might be too strong a word. We'll see.

To reflect some of this, I've refreshed and jumbled the literary links in my blogroll. Blogs newly added include Danny Byrne's — see his excellent review of the first volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's marvelous novel/memoir, My Struggle — Daniel Davis Wood's Infinite Patience — his two most recent posts (one, two) are fascinating meditations on the omniscient narrator (which he calls "the knower") in Edward P. Jones remarkable novel from 2003, The Known World — and Ethan's new blog, Marooned Off Vesta, which seeks to "develop [his] own personal poetics of science fiction and of poetry", and which takes as one of its key influences, among other books and authors, the perhaps seemingly unlikely figure of Gabriel Josipovici, in particular his book What Ever Happened to Modernism? (reminder: my review is here). Samuel R. Delany and Joanna Russ are more obvious inspirations, of course, but topics of other posts have included T.S. Eliot and Hart Crane and Denise Levertov. Good stuff. (Also added to the blogroll is David Winters' Why Not Burn Books, which however seems mostly to link to his typically excellent reviews that appear elsewhere - a handy service nonetheless.)

Since I'm providing some literary links, I would be remiss if I didn't mention long-time fellow traveler Stephen Mitchelmore's This Space, still my most essential literary blog. Like me, Stephen's posting has been very light on quantity this year, but unlike me, he's taken the time to write several excellent longer form reviews and essays. His recent essay on one of my favorite books, V.S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival, is a particular highlight, as are reviews of new novels from Josipovici (Infinity: The Story of a Moment) and Enrique Vila-Matas (Dublinesque), as well as his own review of Knausgaard's My Struggle, which, as is so often the case, led directly to my purchase of that book.

And I have been reading a fair amount of fiction lately. If I had to name the authors that have received the most attention (or at least the most attention to which I took enough notice to acquire and/or read a book) in my literary cohort (as defined by people whose blogs I read and twitter feeds I follow), I'd name, in loosely descending order, László Krasznahorkai, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Lars Iyer, Clarice Lispector, Helen DeWitt, Gerald Murnane, Christine Schutt, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Gabriel Josipovici. All with new books, or books newly translated into English.

I've read books by all of these writers this year, except for Krasznahorkai, whose Satantango I have so far been unable to get anywhere with. DeWitt's very funny Lightning Rods I mentioned early in the year; Iyer's even funnier Dogma, ditto. Knausgaard's My Struggle is a great book - I eagerly await the English translation of volume II! - and I'd like to have something interesting to say about it, but there've been several good reviews of it (including especially the two linked above), so I feel no particular need to add another, at least for now. Lispector's first novel, Near to the Wild Heart was one of four newly translated Lispector novels published by New Directions this year, and was also my introduction to the Brazilian writer. It left me with little I could say about it, other than wanting to express a recognition that she was the real deal and that I will be reading more by her (also, in truth, I wasn't writing anything at the time I read it, so the result is that there is, several months on, little now left to report). But some stunning, often baffling writing in that novel. I enjoyed Vila-Matas' Dublinesque, but, again, would refer you to Stephen's review or David Winters'.  Gerald Murnane's Barley Patch seemed promising, and I liked quite a bit of what he was doing with it, but ultimately it didn't thrill me, sorry to report. I found myself bored with it, at times (though admittedly sometimes this boredom interested me).

The semi-dullness I experienced at the hands of Barley Patch, followed by a clutch of non-fiction (world-systems analysis and feminism), had me grasping for crime fiction to clear the air a bit. So I read the first two of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley books (The Talented Mr. Ripley and Ripley Under Ground), and the three novels comprising Denise Mina's Garnethill trilogy (Garnethill, Exile, Resolution). I'll have nothing whatsoever to say about these books, except that I found them interesting and entertaining and, especially with the Mina trilogy, sigh, gripping (I know, I know). But they did help clear some space.

Since then, I've been on something of a roll - reading great fiction, reading well, thinking about it, talking about it off-blog - yet struggling to find time or energy to write about it. An enthusiastic, passing mention, in the first Marooned Off Vesta post of Marge Piercy's 1976 feminist science fiction classic, Woman on the Edge of Time, encouraged me to read it immediately. I'd already had a friend's copy lying around gathering dust, and had by coincidence been eye-ing it as a possible next read. And I loved it. My initial sense was that it was formally conventional, that it was the ideas and the situation I was responding to, but as I read further, and discussed it, I began to question this sense. It encouraged me to really think, again, about what we take for granted in fiction.

A review by Dan Green of Diane Williams' new collection of stories ends with a comparison of Williams' work with Gary Lutz's. Next thing I knew, I'd ordered and read Lutz's brilliant and bizarre and fascinating early story collection, Stories in the Worst Way. And in Lutz I've found a new favorite writer (and may have fallen in love a little bit) (see also this fantastic and hilarious interview with Lutz at the Paris Review; on whether the stories in his new collection, Divorcer, are more "accessible": "Even in the lengthier of these new stories, despite their elliptical and fragmentary nature, there is something at least approximating an ongoingness of a sort, if not exactly a plot."). Thinking about Lutz's strange stories while also contemplating certain effects in science fiction was a useful and, for me, helpful exercise of recontextualizaton. Around this time I was reminded, via a twitter exchange, of Christine Schutt, who has a new novel out, Prosperous Friends. I'd previously read and liked her novel Florida, when it had been part of the scandalous class of 2004 National Book Award fiction nominees (that is, they were all books written by women). I was also aware of her name from the Dalkey Archive backlist. Prosperous Friends starts out as if it's going to be merely another entry, if a fantastically written entry, in the tired "dissolution of a marriage" novel genre, but it turned out to be much better and more interesting than that. Incidentally, Lutz, Schutt, and Williams were all edited by Gordon Lish - who now emerges as a rather more interesting figure to me than he had been previously (given his association in my mind with Raymond Carver, who I've never read, nor intend to).

Mixed in here was Josipovici's Infinity - an excellent novel, which I am also not prepared to write about at all, yet. I'd again refer you to Stephen's review (and I'd recommend, too, David Winters' review, at PN Review Online, though it's unfortunately subscription required).

Since then, over the last few weeks, I've been alternating some science fiction from Clifford D. Simak (two novels - Time is the Simplest Thing and Why Call Them Back From Heaven? - which, despite some clunkiness and other issues, have, like the science fiction mentioned above, helped me think about fictional problems in ways I haven't quite before) with multiple novels each from Gilbert Sorrentino (Steelwork and Red the Fiend) and John Hawkes (The Passion Artist), two giants of American post-war so-called post-modernism who I'd read quite a bit of before starting this blog but had not much returned to in subsequent years (long review of Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew notwithstanding). Included here are re-reads of Sorrentino's Aberration of Starlight and Hawkes' The Lime Twig. Early returns are that the fiction of Sorrentino and Hawkes holds up, unlike that of other early favorites, such as Martin Amis.

I've covered a lot of ground here, mentioned a lot of writers. But what about those writers not published at the major houses, or even the already better-known independents? Neither FSG nor New Directions or Dalkey Archive? Not Grove, nor even Melville House? Do we as readers take chances on absolute or relative nobodies? I don’t really have an answer for that. My guess is, on balance, no. But, the thing is, I've left out one writer, in the meandering list above - Edmond Caldwell. Caldwell's Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant is published by Say It With Stones, which primarily publishes poetry. They have it on their website; it retails for $15. It’s a decent-looking trade paperback, with entertaining back-cover copy in the place of blurb, plot summary, and author bio, in keeping with the spirit of the book. Yet I admit that I only know about the book, or took notice of it, because Edmond Caldwell has himself been a member of my blogging/tweeting circle (you may remember him from his blogs Contra James Wood and The Chagall Position). In connection with that, we’d blogrolled each other and linked to each other’s posts on occasion, and have exchanged some friendly e-mail. He was nice enough to send me a copy of the novel. I was already curious about it, but frankly, had little real idea what to expect. I’d gathered it included some material on the critic James Wood and, I admit, this made me a wee bit wary. I’d liked most of what he’d written about Wood’s domestication of various writers and their work, but still, I didn’t feel quite the animus towards Wood and at times wondered at the energy expended in the effort. And, to be honest, whenever Edmond posted a link to one of his stories appearing online, I had difficulty getting very far into them. While I had no trouble attributing this difficulty primarily to my own apparent inability to focus at all on fiction published online, this did little to mitigate my wariness. I admit to having fretted a little about how I'd read a novel by someone I'm friendly with (what I'd say, if asked). And when I received the book and read the apparently bland opening sentence (“They had just returned to the United States.”), I was even less sure … Yet, something nagged at me, a feeling that I’d want to read this novel, despite all of these trivial misgivings.

I needn’t have worried. This is a damn good novel. Better than that: it's fucking brilliant. I should here say that it was Dan Green's review of it that reminded me of the novel, which had slipped my mind and gotten filed away amid the post-move chaos over the summer. But, while Dan's review is positive, I feel he does some violence to the book (Steven Augustine objects on similar grounds as mine in his comments there, and he articulates these objections well). But at least it's a review! There are so few of them, and it very much deserves to be read and reviewed and discussed. I hope to have quite a bit more to say about Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant soon myself, but for now, let it suffice to say that it's frequently very funny, formally interesting, as well as being an excellent example of, horrors, politically viable fiction. I daresay it's an important book. Which I only mean in the best possible sense of: you should read it.

To finish up, were I to name my favorite new books of this year, I'd go with Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant; My Struggle; Dogma; Lightning Rods; and Infinity: The Story of a Moment.