Decline Polemics

Over the last year, there has been a lot of discussion about the role of popular criticism in Australian literary culture. I have written two pieces that touch on this subject in different ways: ‘Critical Danger’ for the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas, and ‘In the Same Boat’ for the Sydney Review of Books. I have been very pleased that both of these pieces have received some attention, and also that they have been mentioned in two other very intelligent articles on Australian book reviewing—Ben Etherington’s ‘The Brain Feign’ and Kerryn Goldsworthy’s ‘Everyone’s A Critic’ (which, sadly, is behind a paywall). While I admire the work of both critics (indeed, Goldsworthy quite rightly received this year’s Pascall Prize for criticism), I would nonetheless like to clarify an important aspect of my position that these articles have, albeit understandably, misconstrued.

My critical stance towards aspects of contemporary literary culture has led both Etherington and Goldsworthy to presume my arguments are examples of the ‘decline polemic’, a genre that—as both authors suggest—is a commonly repeated lament across literary cultures throughout history. Etherington draws this conclusion by quoting the end of my article for the Wheeler Centre, mistaking the note I chose to end on for something more apocalyptic than I intended:

More recently, however, roused by Silverman’s complaints in Slate, Stinson has issued his own ‘decline’ clarion: ‘Australian literature should be embattled, passionately fought over … Australian literature doesn’t need saving or preserving – what it needs are partisans, contrarians and heretics.’ The change in pitch would seem to be the result of an increasing awareness of the ‘invidious networks of backscratching and bootlicking’ of online literary communities: it turns out that strongly critical voices are necessary … now!

My critique was not motivated by such ‘invidious networks of backscratching,’ nor do I think the existence of such networks indicates a ‘decline’. As I pointed out in the article, my belief is that social media has simply made these networks ‘newly open to public scrutiny’. In other words, social media, from my perspective, has not created a problem, but rather made explicit a set of networks that have more or less always been there. This is not a decline, but rather a historical continuity.

        Goldsworthy similarly sees both my piece and, interestingly, Etherington’s piece (which I have quoted above) as contemporary examples of ‘the “decline” theme’ which ‘have focused specifically on the Australian literary critical scene and have found it lacking for some of the usual reasons, though both also make other, better and more important arguments.’ Once again, my objection is that my critique of some contemporary reviewing practices does not constitute a belief that there has been a decline in reviewing. I have read too much about the historical reception of texts to believe that there was a golden era of reviewing. One only needs to consider historical examples like William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, whose reviews were so careless that they inspired a book-length response called Fire the Bastards! by Jack Green, or even T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which inspired a shock and outrage in some reviewers that seems unimaginable today. Indeed, I think bad reviewing is a perennial (and likely intractable) problem, and I would actually argue that the persistence of more genuine ‘decline’ polemics testifies to this fact. Again, what I see actually suggests a historical continuity rather than a decline. My main argument in ‘In the Same Boat’ was actually about precisely such a historical continuity: I claim that the cultural cringe still exists, albeit in a new permutation (a point I will return to in a minute)

Admittedly, however, both of these articles—as Etherington notes—sounded a polemical note. Perhaps it was too opaque, but my heightened rhetoric here had a very specific target: those prominent advocates of Australian literary nationalism who have claimed that that Australian literature is being ignored by both universities and the public, and needs to be ‘saved’ from obscurity. I am not entirely unsympathetic to the quite sincere passions that have motivated these nationalist diatribes, but I am (rightly, I think) nervous about the conservative, unnuanced and ultimately ahistorical approach to literature that such positions typically foster. Attempting to create (and institutionally implement) an Australian literary canon is also, from my perspective, not only undesirable but also unlikely to bring about the ends that these nationalists desire. To use a completely anecdotal example, I was educated entirely in the U.S., and yet I never took a single course that included works by Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Emerson, Hemingway, or Thomas Wolfe, but I don’t think U.S. literature is suffering because of this fact.

I will also note that this new literary nationalism happens to coincide (in what certainly is not a coincidence) with several major publishers’ reprinting lists of Australian ‘classics’. Those who know anything about the publishing industry know that selling reprints of classic works is highly profitable, since such reprints don’t incur editing and typesetting costs, are typically printed with stock artwork across a list (i.e. less expensive cover designs), and are often printed on inferior (and therefore cheaper) paper. Works in the public domain are even more profitable, since no royalties need to be paid to the author, meaning that the publisher absorbs the author’s margin (which is usually around 10% of the recommend retail price). For these reasons, it is difficult to discern where the new nationalism stops and the economic rationalism begins.  
             While I remain sceptical of this new nationalism, which I do not think ultimately addresses the unique historical factors that are indirectly affecting publishing, criticism, and literary production more generally, I also wanted to avoid the trap of much academic criticism—often written in abstracted, officious tone—that pretends to have risen above all worldly interests to arrive at the only logical conclusion possible. I was trying to argue for a concept of criticism that is impassioned and opinionated, but still analytical and reflexive. 
         Given the positions articulated both here and in the article itself, the most head-scratching response to ‘In the Same Boat’ comes from Ali Alizadeh, who, in a post for Southerly, seems to think that I support the nationalist position (I explicitly state my disagreement with the literary nationalists twice in the article). He also seems to think the fact that Cate Kennedy published several books in Australia before being published in The New Yorker refutes my point. But this actually supports my argument: despite a strong local track record of publishing, she only received broader notoriety after international success in The New Yorker. Despite these oddities, I agree with many of Alizadeh’s other arguments, including that literature serves an ideological function; indeed, one of the key points of my article was to argue that certain ‘progressive’, liberal notions of multiculturalism and globalism in Australia paradoxically foster a nationalist ideology (a point that has been made, if in very different terms and contexts, by Ghassan Hage), and that Australian literary production reflects this fact. 
          The problem with Alizadeh’s argument—and the reason, I think, why he misinterprets my arguments—is that he has completely failed to understand the cultural cringe. Alizadeh seems to think that the cultural cringe cannot exist because he finds ‘the proposal that contemporary Australians may be lacking in national pride rather absurd’. I agree that Australians have national pride (again, I make this point explicitly in my article), but having national pride does not mean that the cringe has been overcome; in point of fact, such nationalism is actually part of the cringe, a point that A.A. Phillips himself makes by terming excessive displays of national pride the ‘cringe inverted’. The cringe is a phenomenon that actually represents the anxiety that Australians feel about their own cultural products in relation to foreign culture. This anxiety can manifest in strange and paradoxical ways, which is precisely what I tried to argue in ‘In the Same Boat’—that the new internationalism in Australian literary production still responds to the same anxieties that motivated the original cringe, even if it manifests in a very different form. Indeed, the fact that so many conversations about the place of Australian literature in relation to global literatures have taken place, regardless of the positions taken by the various interlocutors, seems to me to suggest that the anxieties which have underpinned the various forms of the cringe are very much alive and well.

Against Creativity

The below was a “provocation” I delivered at the conference NonfictionNow held last weekend in Melbourne for a panel (dubiously) entitled "Public Sphere Literary Criticism as Creative Nonfiction."

The main contention of this panel, as I understand it, is that literary criticism in general, and book reviewing in particular, should be viewed as a creative act. It’s worth thinking briefly about why such a claim would be contentious—and the answer, I think, is that definitions of creativity over the last 500 years have typically evolved in opposition to conceptions of criticism and scholarship. The key term in the history of the division between criticism and creativity is genius.

When the conception of genius appeared in the 18th Century, the artist’s task was profoundly changed: unlike the master artists of the classical tradition, geniuses did not require formal schooling to master their artistic technique. As Edward Young noted in his Conjectures on Original Composition from 1759, ‘genius is from heaven, learning from man.’ For the genius to rely too heavily on erudition would result in scholastic imitation, rather than radical originality.

But the genius’s ability to generate original works of art comes at a great price: the genius is not capable of understanding how his or her own work is produced, because the genius’s creative ability is not a product of rational understanding, but an innate faculty or talent. As Kant says in his Critique of Judgment, ‘no Homer or Wieland can show how his ideas, so rich at once in fantasy and in thought, enter and assemble themselves in his brain, for the good reason that he does not himself know, and so cannot teach others.’ In simple terms, genius is, above all, a figure who does not understand what it is he is doing.

         Because the genius can only produce work without understanding it, the post-Kantian paradigm of art had to suppose an informed spectator in the form of a knowledgeable critic, who—in a relationship not dissimilar to that of the analysand and analyst—supplements the work of art by explaining what it means. The critic becomes necessary for decoding the work of art, which the genius produced but can’t possibly understand. The result of this fairly sad state of historical affairs is that critics and artists have been pitted as would-be antagonists, even as each has parasitically relied upon the other.
           But the notion of the genius that I have just described died somewhere in the second half of the 20th Century, I think—I will let you decide where. Instead, we are in the process of developing a new notion of aesthetics in which the key term is no longer genius, but rather creativity. While I am in no way nostalgic for the older paradigm of genius, it is nonetheless hard to see the new paradigm of creativity as a positive development. Creativity is one of those words that provokes an immediately positive response, and therefore is beloved by bureaucracy. 

          Creativity, above all, is a neoliberal and late capitalist word that we associate not only with such entities as creative writing programs, but also with economic concepts like the creative class and cultural creatives—and what creativity signals above all else is a lifestyle choice, a choice to be the kind of romantic, inner-city dwelling person who is not tied down to a specific locality, a restrictive work schedule, and who does not see the value in traditional institutions (in this sense, the advertising "creative" may be the figure of contemporary creativity par excellence). The “creative” person is thus a member of a transnational, cosmopolitan bourgeoisie, and “creativity” itself becomes a celebration of precisely this state of affairs.

The paradigm of creativity no longer needs the critic, because “creatives” are not interested in criticism or in systematic critical thinking or even the history of art, since being creative is about being in an amnesiac and ever-present state of possibility—a constant state of a potential coming to fullness that ultimately reflects the hyperproductivity of a globalised, networked post-historical monoculture. Indeed, creativity is, for better or worse, simply the cultural equivalent of what is perhaps neoliberalism’s favourite word—innovation, and the modern paradigm of the creative individual more or less adheres to a model of entrepreneurship, albeit an entrepreneurship in which the return on investment is perpetually delayed, perhaps until death and even beyond.

Under the paradigm of creativity, the critic’s traditional function has been absorbed by a new set of institutions that now consecrate creative works. Much of the process of canonization of writers now falls onto the prize system, and literary culture, for better or worse, has become almost entirely a prize culture—a state that is evident in the way all authors’ bios list not only their wins but also the instances in which they have been shortlisted for an ever proliferating number of literary prizes.

Although it is increasingly being stripped of both its cultural capital and largely phased out of a variety of institutions, such as universities and the media, where humanities and book reviews appear under constant threat, criticism is more important now than ever. For the reasons I described above, I would be very happy if criticism—despite the fact that it certainly involves and requires creativity in the everyday sense—continues to stay away from creativity. Even better, I truly hope that it takes a few artists with it, pushing them to be not creative at all, but scholastic, learned, imitative, critical, to accept that rational thought is part of the repertoire of human experience and emotions rather than something that is opposed to emotion, and to aspire towards work that is difficult, rigorous, complex, obscure, discomfiting, challenging, and even painful from time to time. Rather than a creative criticism, how about a criticism that aspires toward a non-creative fiction, towards a more substantial art than the disposable commercial realism of most so-called literary works?

          I would suggest that in the current climate of “creativity,” criticism’s job—its work—is to be both utopian and reactionary, and to do what it can to work against the diffusion of generic principles of a marketable creativity, to argue for the value of difficulty, and to excavate and enliven dead traditions that have too quickly been cast-off by a modernity that has attempted to declare all of history obsolete. In simple terms, it still falls to the critic to encourage people to think, to read, to question, and to remind everyone that art is and needs to be something more than an entertaining reflection of our vertiginous world which seems stuck in a never-ending present even as it hurtles toward an uncertain future.

My Struggle (Vol. 1) By Karl Ove Knausgaard

The first volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle is simultaneously very easy and virtually impossible to do justice to in a book review. On the one hand, this is a novel whose very name aims for provocation: it's Norwegian title, Min Kamp, explicitly echoes Hitler's Mein Kampf. Moreover, the incredible ambition of the book screams for attention: billed by its publishers, Archipelago Books, as a "Proustian" novel, My Struggle stretches across six volumes all of which purport to dissect its author's life with an obsessive attention to detail. Indeed, the book, which was a bestseller in Norway, has prompted intense, negative reactions from many of the real people "depicted" in the book, including Knausgaard's uncle and his first wife. But these newsworthy details are ultimately misleading, and My Struggle is a far more nuanced, subtle and complicated book than this thumbnail sketch would suggest. In my opinion, it is also, without a doubt, the most exceptional novel yet to be published this year.

     The book opens with an abstract passage that has been much quoted in reviews: "For the heart, life is simple: it beats as long as it can. Then it stops." After several pages of beautiful expository prose, the narrative mostly focuses on Knusgaard's childhood and adolescence, with particular attention paid to his problematic relationship with his father. Much of the material here--though excellently paced--may feel like a fairly typical Bildungsroman: the older Karl Ove reflects on his younger self's naivete and failings with a subtle and distanced irony that recalls not just Proust but the long tradition of the self-ironizing "confession" that stretches back through Rousseau and Augustine. There is a wonderful charge to this section, and, although I grew up in America and not Norway and am over a decade younger that Knausgaard, I identified directly with a great deal of this material--as I suspect will most Western readers (in this sense, My Struggle demonstrates how universal cultural experiences in the first world have become under late capitalism). But I was also struck by the fact that at points the prose seems--while never dull--almost unremarkable; the attention to detail is beyond fastidious, and many recountings of conversations violate the first rule of novelistic dialogue (which is never to allow a character to give a straight answer to a simple question).

     As it turns out, however, this approach--though never calling attention to itself too directly--is essential to Knausgaard's aesthetics, which are indirectly articulated in the brilliant second half of the novel. Although My Struggle's style could hardly be considered Modernist, in the second section it becomes clear that the book takes very seriously the long history of 20th Century art, and what it seeks is rather to chart an alternate path to Modernity; instead of rejecting the mimetic mode of "realism" (in the 19th-Century sense), My Struggle is a hypertrophic realism, in which detail accumulates to the point where traditional modes of mimesis are overwhelmed by detail itself. The novel explains this position when Karl Ove discusses his preference for pre-20th Century paintings: "However, it was striking to me that [my favourite works] were all painted before the 1900s, within the artistic paradigm that always retained some reference to visible reality. Thus, there was always a certain objectivity to them, by which I mean a distance between reality and the portrayal of reality, and it was doubtless in this interlying space where it 'happened,' where it appeared, whatever it was I saw, when the world seemed to step forward from the world." (Obviously, this section also provides a key insight into the novel's complicated configuration of biography and fiction.) 

     Put simply, My Struggle is as much about the struggle to write a novel after the weight of the 20th Century and literary theory (the book explicitly references, albeit in a thankfully non-systematic fashion, Derrida, Walter Benjamin, and Blanchot), as it is about the life of "Karl Ove Knausgaard." Yes, there are intentional nods toward Proust; aside from being six volumes long, there are many descriptions of tea brewing in tea cups, which might be an allusion to Proust's "episode of the madeleine," although Knausgaard's versions are intentionally stripped of symbolic value through their repetition--and in this sense the seeming allusion is actually a marker of distance. If My Struggle is "Proustian," then it's a Proustian novel after Blanchot--a Proustian series of rememberances in which any sentimental notion of memory itself is intentionally "unworked" by an overly rigorous attention to detail, which becomes claustrophobic in the second half of the novel as Karl Ove is required to clean his grandmother's absolutely squalid house. The final section also significantly involves a corpse--a seeming invocation of Blanchot's "Two Versions of The Imaginary," a text that links the notion of the work of art directly to the conception of a dead body.

     At the same time, it's worth emphasising that this book is surprisingly easy to read; despite the fact that very little happens, there are a huge number of fulfilling narrative revelations, and, for this reason, I haven't tried to say too much about the novel's plot as such. What I will note is that the novel, in this sense, also represents a major achievement: for all of its (clearly) high-art pedigree, it is a book that will equally appeal to fans of more standard literary faire, and this, to me, is what makes it an exceptional work of literature: My Struggle simultaneously follows in both the 19th Century realist tradition and the 20th Century Modernist tradition (which rejected realism!)--no small feat. This is why My Struggle is likely to be the best book published this year. There have been other great novels out this year, like Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Satantango--but however good, Satantango is recongnisably a certain kind of late modern/postmodern novel: whereas Satantango's shifting perspectives, Faulknerian long sentences, thematic considerations of observation (i.e. Foucault's Panopticism/Systems Theory/Quantum Mechanics), and Moebius-Strip structure all draw from a well-established playbook, My Struggle cannot be so easily categorized. This isn't to criticise Satantango, which is a great late-modernist, high-art novel, but only to point out that it is a great example of a certain tradition rather than an exceeding of that tradition as such. My Struggle, on the other hand, represents something genuinely new--the establishment of a possibility in literature that has not yet been exhausted by Joyce or Proust or Woolf or Sebald or Gertrude Stein (although, arguably, My Struggle's compulsive detail is not entirely distant from Stein's linguistic obsessiveness). Simply put, this is one of the few books from the last decade (I would list Bolano's 2666 as another) to demonstrate that the novel has life left in it, and that there are trajectories that remain beyond the well-trodden paths of Modernism and Postmodernism. 

'Graham Greene Is The World's Greatest Second-Rate Novelist'

Below is a video of a talk I gave the other month on Graham Greene's The Quiet American, a book that I am ultimately not fond of (for reasons that I articulate in the video). Also, N.B. the clip assumes you have read the novel, so there are massive spoilers about the ending from the very start.

'The Problem with the New Yorker Story Is That It's Too Well Written'

My friend Adam Rivett drew my attention to these totally awesome Bookworm interviews with Gilbert Sorrentino, who is/was one of my heroes (and the author of the quote at the top of this blog). Anyone interested in his work--and, really, anyone who has ever wanted to be a writer or an artist--should buy Sorrentino's brilliant Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things immediately. But these interviews also provide some really useful insights into his writing, and they also emphasise the continuity between Sorrentino's work and the 'homemade' quality of much American modernism--in that both attain a great deal of textual and theoretical complexity while engaging with material that is openly local and often (intentionally) banal. But despite engaging with the simple, Sorrentino's work remains both philosophically dense (it is not inappropriate, for example, to note a resonance between Sorrentino's ideas and Blanchot's literary theory) and innovative in a rigorously formal manner (much of Sorrentino's methodology, as the below interview emphasises, resembles Oulipo).


In this interview, Sorrentino also does a great job of explaining something that I have often not been able to articulate clearly: why I don't like The New Yorker (many of whose staff members are soon to descend upon Melbourne). Sorrentino's point, both brilliant and humble, is that the problem with the kind of realist fiction that the The New Yorker represents is that it appears to know things, or to teach us things, with a kind of discomfiting certainty:


'The problem is that the writers who write those [New Yorker] stories always annoy me because they take this position in which they supposedly have the answers. They know everything. Well, I don't know everything. I know very little. And my point is to try to write a book that is true to its own structure...a writer can only really lie in terms of his form. He can't really lie any other way.'

On the Arriere-Garde

'Since the end of the 19th Century then, literature has been living under the sign of anachronism: it does not feel in sync anymore, either with society and with the expectations it no longer feels capable of fulfilling, or--[a] fate which is even worse--with itself and with the ideals that Romanticism lent to it. It is not enough then to consider arriere-gardism as the simple reality of a few marginalized literary movements which should only interest us to the extent we seek to exhaust all aspects of history. On the contrary, we should enlarge our perspective and face the facts: literature in the 20th century existed in a state of generalized arriere-gardism, and in the general feeling of a permanent time delay of which, paradoxically, the existence of the avant-garde was the most flagrant indicator. If the century that has just ended can still retain the title "century of the avant-garde", and if the avant-garde has succeeded in making its presence felt more than ever, it is for a reason. And it is for the same reason that the question of the rapport with the past has never been asked with such anguish: in the 20th century, literature lost its temporal markers and had to create artificial ones to remedy the loss; the invention of avant-gardist tension, a tension that was as political as it was aesthetic, had no other real function but to impose a power orientation--even though it was part of a fictional one--on a history that seemed to lack meaning. The avant-garde forges a way to the future: it seeks a way out of the crisis by moving ahead or simply by leaving History. Vincent Kaufmann puts it this way: the avant-garde authors "never tackled anything else than the project of a total book, that is, the Book, representing the end of books, in every sense of the word".'
--William Marx, 'The 20th Century: Century of the Arriere-Gardes?' in Europa! Europa? The Avant-Garde, Modernism and the Fate of a Continent, Eds. Sascha Bru et al.

On the Figure of the Aporia

“Why this language, which does not fortuitously resemble that of negative theology? How to justify the choice of negative form (aporia) to designate a duty that, through the impossible or the impracticable, nonetheless announces itself in an affirmative fashion? Because one must avoid good conscience at all costs. Not only good conscience as the grimace of an indulgent vulgarity, but quite simply the assured form of self-consciousness: good conscience as subjective certainty is incompatible with the absolute risk that every promise, every engagement, and every responsible decision—if there are such—must run. To protect the decision or the responsibility by knowledge, by some theoretical assurance, or by the certainty of being right, of being on the side of science, of consciousness or of reason, is to transform this experience into the deployment of a program, into a technical application of a rule or a norm, or into the subsumption of a determined ‘case.’”

                                           --Jacques Derrida, Aporias, 19.

Gerald Murnane's New Novel

So, according to an annual list published by the Fairfax papers here in Australia, Gerald Murnane's new novel, entitled A History of Books, is due out in June of 2011. It's still not listed on his publisher's website, but Murnane did speak about the book in a 2009 interview with the ABC, although his description is typically enigmatic: "I suppose this is getting outside the scope of our interview, but I'm very much aware and very proud of myself for having completed recently a 30,000-word novella called A History of Books. And I couldn't have written that if I hadn't first written Barley Patch because the whole subject of A History of Books is what we're talking about, and if you...well, please God you will eventually read that and you will be given far more on the subject, that this narrator, this self-examining, self-probing narrator, goes deeply into the matter of...and in fact memories from one book invade and mingle with memories from another, so that his mind seems to consist of very little else but this...call it a world, made up of these images that arose. They weren't sometimes even reported or described in the text but they arose while the reading took place."

Best Literature in Translation 2011

In many ways, I thought this was a slightly odd year for literature in translation; I read an enormous number of books that I really, really liked, but only a few that I felt were truly classic books that I would return to again and again in the future. Moreover, several "big name" foreign authors released books that, in my opinion, were simply not very good (so I will warn you in advance that you won't see Murakami, Peter Nadas, Cesar Aira or Enrique Villa-Matas anywhere on this list). I have also cheated a bit: two books on it were actually published in 2010 and 2009, but I only got around to reading them this year, and another two books are either re-issues or re-translations. As ever, I refuse to rank the books below, because they are all great, and every single one of them is worth reading. Lastly, those of you who read sites like Three Percent, ReadThisNext and Conversational Reading may notice quite a few familiar titles; there's nothing magical or coincidental about this, since those are places I tend to turn for recommendations on books. And if you don't read those sites, you should! Without further ado, here were some of my favourites from the last year...

Jenny Erpenbeck – Visitation
Yes, this came out in 2010, but I only got to it in January of 2011. This phenomenal "novel"--much like Jennifer Egan's vastly overrated A Visit from the Goon Squad--is really a series of interconnected short stories about the history of a single piece of land in Germany during the 20th Century. Despite its seemingly weighty subject matter, its gorgeous prose is consistently inventive, and its rounded psychological portraits will appeal to readers of more "conventional" books as well. With this book, Erpenbeck has already become one of my favourite contemporary European writers. Highly recommended.

Goncalo Tavares – Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique
This novel--to my mind--fits in with a larger return to naturalism that appears to be burgeoning at the moment, but what separates Tavares's work is its dark sense of humour and absurdist tendencies. The protagonist, a power hungry, immoral doctor not-so-subtly named Lenz Buchmann is portrayed in a manner that walks a thin line between melodrama and pastiche--and it works brilliantly. This is a phenomenal and satisfying portrait of a despicable character, and one of the most interesting books I've read in 2011. I can't wait for the publication of Tavares's Joseph Walser's Machine in 2012. Oh, and Tavares's earlier novel Jerusalem is also brilliant, if not quite as successful as this one.

Sergio Chejfec – My Two Worlds
This short little novella--Chejfec's first to be translated into English--simply recounts an author walking through a park, but this simple plot presents the basis for a text of exceptional complexity. Although outwardly resembling Peter Handke's Afternoon of a Writer, My Two Worlds is a complicated work that slyly alludes to a variety of stories by Borges and presents--in fictionalized form--Chejfec's own meditations on the relationship between the world, memory and fiction. This book is a must-read for anyone with even a passing interest in World Literature.

Peter Sloterdijk – Terror from the Air
There are many reasons for disqualifying this book from consideration for this list: 1) it was published in 2009, and 2) it is a work of theory rather than fiction. Sloterdijk, however, is not only one of Europe's most important contemporary philosophers, but also a philosopher with a truly literary style in the tradition of Nietzsche. Terror from the Air argues for a radical new understanding of modernity in relation to three factors: terrorism, product design and increasing awareness of the fact that humans are situated in atmospheric environments. From this simple starting point, he is able to offer a radically new understanding of the 20th Century. Although the massive tome Bubbles, which is part one of his Spheres trilogy, was published this year, Terror from the Air (which is actually the first section of Spheres III: Foam) is the best introduction to this essential thinker.

Magdalena Tulli – In Red
"Whosoever has been everywhere and seen everything should last of all pay a visit to Stitchings." So begins Magdalena Tulli's enchanting novella about the ill-fated Polish town of Stichings. Although Tulli uses a technique that might be described as "magical realism," this brief narrative is full of inventive linguistic and formal surprises and a wickedly bleak sense of humour. This is a beautiful book that is also printed in a characteristically lovely edition by Archipelago Press.

Georges Perec – The Art and Craft of Asking Your Boss for a Raise
This weird little book by Perec--which had previously been considered untranslatable--uses a compositional style that is entirely based on an algorithm given to Perec by a computer scientist, resulting in a form completely unlike that of any other novel you've ever read. By turns hysterically funny, frustrating and inventive, David Bellos's wonderful translation brings this strange-but-essential book to life in English.

Bohumil Hrabal – Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age
Though previously available in English, NYRB Books has re-released this classic of 20th Century Czech Literature, which is easily the funniest piece of prose I read this year next to the ultimate section of Evan Dara's The Easy Chain. This one-sentence novel is the monologue of an old man that is full of one-liners and twisted humour that results from the structural semantic ambiguity created by intentionally misplaced modifiers. If you don't know what that means, read it and see for yourself.

Eduoard Leve – Suicide
Ten days after handing his publisher the manuscript of his final novel, Suicide, Eduoard Leve took his own life. This fact haunts this fictional work about the suicide of a young man, which intentionally both encourages and discourages identification with the real-life figure of Leve. This mesmerising short novel is written in a stark prose that only increases its emotional impact, and, except for a formal shift at the end that doesn't quite work, was one of the most affecting novels I read all year.

Claire Lispector – The Hour of the Star
Although long available in English, New Directions has published a new translation of The Hour of the Star, which further highlights Lispector's deeply idiosyncratic prose. Indeed, The Hour of the Star is such a strange book that I am still not completely sure what to make of it--and I have not been so completely unsettled and intrigued by a prose style since reading Robert Walser's The Robber (which is no small compliment). This is a novel I hope to return to soon, and, given that New Directions is publishing at least four more Lispector novels in new translations next year, it's a given that her work will begin to receive greater recognition.


Honourable Mentions: Patrik Ourednik's The Opportune Moment, 1855, Jean Echenoz's Lightning, Ludvik Vakulic's The Guinea Pigs, Gert Jonke's The Distant Sound, Rene Belletto's Coda, Antonio Lobo Antunes's The Land at the End of the World

The Intentional Fallacy and Edouard Leve's Suicide

According to the most precious intellectual resource of our time--by which, of course, I mean Wikipedia--the intentional fallacy is a term that "in literary criticism, addresses the assumption that the meaning intended by the author of a literary work is of primary importance. By characterizing this assumption as a 'fallacy', a critic suggests that the author's intention is not important." The principle was a tenet of the academic movement known as the New Criticism--a method of literary criticism that emphasised the literary/rhetorical aspects of a text and argued for textual interpretations based on the internal linguistic evidence within a text, rather than by relying on historical, biographical or theoretical methods of analysis. Later on, the intentional fallacy was the one of the chief pieces of evidence used to convict the New Criticism of ahistoricism (or of prefering synchrony over diachrony, if you prefer the Marxist/Hegelian way of saying the same thing), a charge still levied against the New Critics today.

That being said, the academy's attacks on the New Criticism have largely been a case of protesting too much; the fact is that virtually every high school and undergraduate literature seminar is run along practices and methodologies espoused by the New Criticism--specifically that rational human beings can uncover the "meaning" within a text through close reading. And by extension, the intentional fallacy is a pretty sound general concept: sure, we can probably agree that Melville meant to include a whale in the novel Moby Dick, but would we agree that he intended it to be a fable about the impossibility of humans mastering nature (which is, incidentally, the most boring interpretation of Moby Dick I can think of)? And even if Melville had intended the latter, would it limit other readings of Moby Dick, or make them less "correct"?

The problem of intentionality is further compounded by the fact that writers are notorious liars (how strange for a group of people whose career involves making things up!), and even their own speeches, notes, and diaries, as a result, are often treated more like the statements of an analysand than gospel truth. The fact of the matter is that, once a book has been published, the author can no longer claim authority over its meaning (indeed, book reviews are predicated on this notion).

But Eduoard Leve's novel Suicide presents a serious problem for the notion of the intentional fallacy. In the novel, the narrator recounts a series of interactions with a friend (addressed throughout as "you"), who, as we learn in the opening pages, has committed suicide. Ten days after delivering this manuscript to the publisher, however, Leve took his own life. It is impossible, or so it seems to me, not to read the novel in light of this fact.

The translator's thoughtful essay at the end of the book emphasises that Leve's own suicide and the fictional suicide within the book are different in many ways, but, in point of fact, Suicide is a book that plays with these very concepts of identity. The narrator claims that he was never really close with "you" while "you" were alive, but the level of detail about "your" internal psychological states radically undermines this claim. Like in Bergman's great film, Persona, Leve's characters--the narrator's "I" and his friend's "you"--slowly merge into a singular entity over the course of the novel. Unsurprisingly, this gesture is emphasised by the fact that "you" has a variety of difficulties in accepting his own subjectivity.

On a formal level, Suicide is written in appropriately spare prose, but flows in a stream-of-conscious type of narrative that would appeal to fans of Bernhard (although without Bernhard's trademark irony). My only qualm, ironically, concerns the book's final gesture, which requires a stark formal shift into verse, that doesn't quite work, although it is possible that the verse does not translate into English as well as the prose. All in all, Suicide is a phenomenal little novel well worth a read, and a brilliant introduction to Leve (this is his first novel translated into English). As a result, I am now very much anticipating the publication of his book Autoportrait, due to be published by the always-brilliant Dalkey Archive next year.

Neo-Naturalism and Jean Echenoz's Lightning

In a review of Tom McCarthy's C from last year, I noted that McCarthy's novel--despite its much-vaunted use of ideas from second-wave cybernetics and Systems Theory--was really an updated version of naturalism that shares more in common with Thomas Hardy than the formal innovations of Modernism. The main innovation in C is that, instead of making its protagonist a Christ-like innocent as in Jude the Obscure, the main character, Serge, is a flat, affectless figure typical of "postmodern" texts. In the year since making this argument, however, I've noted that McCarthy is just one among a larger "movement," including such authors as Michel Houellebecq, Goncarlo Tavares and Jean Echenoz, producing work that could broadly be described as a form of neo-naturalism.

Echenoz's Lightning--like C--focuses on issues surroudning the development of technological modernity as a series of complex networked systems, and its central figure Gregor (a thinly disguised portrait of Nikola Tesla) is  a deeply neurotic man who also possesses an exceptional genius for inventing new technologies linked to electricity. Ultimately, though, Lightning is a far more successful book than C for two reasons: 1) its relative brevity means that its strident antihumanism doesn't feel repetitive, and 2) the narration itself has an arch tone that gives the text a much-needed layer of irony.

At the same time, though, the book is not without its flaws. The first 50 pages, in particular, read more like a summary of events than a narrative, and, as such, will seem largely superfluous to anyone who has even a passing familiarity with Tesla's life. Later in the book, however, Echenoz begins to offer a more unique perspective on the events of Tesla's life, and Lightning ultimately develops into a stirring and wonderfully odd little book.

But for all it's merits, my only objection to Lightining is that, for all its ingenuity, it's ultimately the second-best version of Tesla's life presented in recent years, since the best is undoubtedly this:

Drunk History vol. 6 w/ John C. Reilly & Crispin Glover from John C Reilly

Book Review: In Red by Magdalena Tulli

"In Red, the new novella from Magdalena Tulli, tells the story of the ill-fated town of Stitchings. From the very first sentence, though, Tulli makes it clear that this will not be a story that ends happily: ‘Whoever has been everywhere and seen everything, last of all should pay a visit to Stitchings.’ Tulli is regarded as one of Poland’s most important writers and it is easy to see why: her unusual prose is charged with irony and ambiguity that leads in a variety of unexpected directions, and it is the strength of her unusual narrative voice that ultimately knits together the disparate material in this wonderfully strange book."

Read more over at Readings website.

On Life Kills and Moron-Proof Books

Below is a video of my (very brief!) launch speech for Miles Vertigan's excellent debut novel Life Kills. (Synopsis: Unpopular books, a Peter Sloterdijk-inspired reading of the novel, AusLit's love affair with boring realism, moron-proof books).

Tibor Fischer on Parallel Stories

Over the weekend, Tibor Fischer published what could certainly be called a scathing review of Nadas's Parallel Stories. Although I have major concerns about the review, we are agreed on the unnecessarily repetitive scatology of the book:


"Every time a new male character appears you fear he's going to be wanking or investigating his foreskin in a line or two (and he will be). The only relief from cocks is the occasional intervention of some labia or a clitoris. Doubtless, Nádas has some artful justification for this, but it's like having your face jammed in someone's crotch – it gets exasperating very quickly, and there's still 900 pages to go."


Fischer is right about this, but, at heart, this review is an attack on an intellectualized continental aesthetics and an assertion of pretty typical Anglophone aesthetics--that books should appeal to everyone, serve as an entertainment, and not, God forbid, challenge a reader in any way:


"And the Germans, it seems to me, have encouraged the Teutonic notion that anything entertaining or exciting must be lightweight or pulp. Serious writing has to be … serious, and hard work. If you're not straining, it ain't literature. László Krasznahorkai and Peter Nádas seem to be particular exponents of this attitude."


This is the same sort of "common sense" aesthetics that English reviewers used to assail Coleridge back when he incorporated Kant's philosophy in his literary criticism. It was wrong then, and it's wrong now. I don't recall any reviews of Atonement complaining that McEwan's book wasn't a 900-page experimental novel, but it appears that every experimental novel is expected to justify its existence, as if the mere publication of such a work is an insult to the mythical figure of the "average reader." It's about time that reviewers who should know better stop pretending that wilful philistinism is some kind of enlightened or democratic position. Sadly, in most popular literary criticism, this soft form of anti-intellectualism appears to be the dominant paradigm.

Exclusion Clauses

Over at Kill Your Darlings, Emily Bitto has an excellent piece on the disappearance of long sentences from contemporary literature, touching on two issues I've written on before: 1) the formal conservatism of contemporary Australian--and, by extension, Anglophone--prose (see here, for example), and 2) the relationship between minimalism as an aesthetic doctrine and creative writing programs (and for my thoughts on CW programs, see here and here).


As someone who has tended towards the long sentence in my own fiction, I agree that there is a bias against the long sentence; I've lost count of how many literary editors I've encountered believe that good editing entails turning every long sentence into a series of shorter ones. I'll also just note two other points that weren't mentioned in the piece, which I think add to Bitto's argument:


1) The long sentence is actually the preferred vessel for English Lit. over its long history. Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century British and U.S. writers consistently use sentences with multiple dependent clauses and the like. In fact, it is the preference for a journalistic, "economical" prose--as promoted by Hemingway, E.B. White, and, later on, William Zinsser (although their ideas can be useful!)--that is actually the exception. The long sentence, historically speaking, has been the rule.


2) Having taught and studied creative writing in the U.S. and Australia, I don't think that minimalism is "officially" promoted as the writing style. Rather, there's a subtle pressure, or a predisposition towards minimalism. Just as most English Literature departments will have a de facto preference for Continental Theory over Analytic Philosophy (a preference I share), few CW programs actually foist minimalism on students as a requirement. Aside from one absolutely horrendous CW instructor, all of my teachers were very supportive of my own work with long sentences.

Book Review: The Opportune Moment, 1855

I've got a review of Patrick Ourednik's The Opportune Moment, 1855 up over at the website of Readings Books and Music. Here's the opening:


"Czech author Patrick Ourednik’s newly translated novella, The Opportune Moment, 1855, tells the story of a group of expatriate Europeans attempting to start an anarchist commune, called the Fraternitas Free Settlement, in Brazil. But from the very outset, the reader knows that the settlement is doomed; the novel opens with a letter, dated March 1902, written by the leader of this anarchist collective – a man affectionately referred to by his followers as ‘Older Brother’. While the letter is meant to serve as a sort ofapologia pro sua vita, Older Brother’s self-important and grandiloquent expression of his lofty ideals spills over into comic pastiche, and his laments about the failure of the commune emphasise his own unwillingness to take any responsibility for its collapse. While he bemoans various problems with his plan’s execution – particularly his poor choice of volunteers for the first wave of settlers – he refuses to admit any error and stands by his principles." Read the rest here.

Don't Trust the Writer

Joseph McElroy (author of Night Soul and Other Stories) has written a short piece on why he refuses to answer questions about where he gets his ideas from; it's a wonderful antidote to most writers's thoughts on this topic, and not only does he (correctly, in my opinion) argue that authors don't understand were there work comes from, but also offers a fairly interesting conception of what a good story should do:

"What can happen? my stories ask, as I ask of my life and yours. Not only what did happen, but mainly: What can happen? A story about a boomerang thrower in Paris, or a story about a father and his infant son in his crib in the dark making sounds that the father begins to make sense of during three successive desert nights. What can happen? Sometimes I’ll read just the beginning of a story to an audience and ask where it could go from there. But the writer is mainly invisible, and the story stands on its own between the reader and the writer and would have to be about both if we could only know, but stands on its own and belongs to the reader and in the great differences among the stories in my book Night Soul might even sometimes suggest to you the reader how to read it."

Read more here.

Struggling through Peter Nadas's Parallel Stories

Peter Nadas's 1138-page novel Parallel Stores was published by Farrar Straus and Giroux at the end of October, and it's being touted, by its publishers at least, as a Proustian "masterwork" of world literature, much in the way that Roberto Bolano's 2666 (not coincidentally also published by FSG) was back in 2008. The novel took Nadas seventeen years to write, and was another four in translation, so it has been germinating for a long time. The book has also begun to receive some glowing reviews (see here, here and here). Before talking a little more about why I think there's good reason to be skeptical of these claims, I want to note two things: 1) there are some absolutely brilliant moments in the book (the opening forty pages, in particular, are excellent), and 2) I actually have only read about 400 pages of it. I realize that point #2 should disqualify me from making any comment at all, but I think there are very specific local issues with the book, and I haven't yet seen these noted in detail, although Scott Esposito's post at Conversational Reading does deal with many of the other problems (and this post is also meant to serve as an explanation of why I am unlikely to finish the book).


Parallel Stories does many things well: its ability to shift between perspectives and characters, often across decades, in a single sentence is impressive and effective, even if it isn't particularly inventive or new (these kinds of shifts, to my mind, are pretty much the stock gesture of what we conceive of as literary Modernism, as evidenced in Joyce, Faulkner, Proust, Woolf, etc., etc.). Moreover, Nadas does a good job of creating a consistently tense atmosphere, and his psychological evocation of characters, particularly the young Dohring and Gyongyver, are also wonderfully evoked, if also heavily indebted to the Modernist psychological novel [Added later: yes, I just said that an "evocation" is "wonderfully evoked," proving that this editor needs an editor]. But the problems with the book are legion and, to my mind, fairly obvious.


Despite all of the brilliant bits in the book, there's basically just no excuse for passages like this: "To this day, he urinated like a little boy. He did not pull back his wrinkly, unusually long, funnel-shaped and pointy foreskin from his bulb, and when he finished he barely shook his member, letting some of the fluid be smeared on his fingers. He'd dig in with his fingers between his thighs under the testicles, where he always found for himself some worthy odor. Only rarely did he risk invading the cheeks of his buttocks to touch the crimped edge of his contracted anus. Perhaps to rub it just a little bit, to reach into it, as an experiment. But it did happen on occasion. The various odors nicely mingled on his fingers where he preserved them for the rest of the day. He saved them for the night, when he would have unhindered access to his body, though he had to be on his guard in the bluish light of the dormitory, listen for and follow with open eyes every little stirring [...]When he couldn't tuck his weenie between his thighs, or couldn't touch it, not even through his pants, because in the boarding school everybody was watching everybody else all the time, he consoled himself with these odors. And this remained the same later too, with his cock, though its odor had become more penetrating."


One's ability to enjoy Parallel Stories is predicated on whether or not you find this kind of writing revelatory, especially since such passages appear on virtually every other page.


Look, I'm not trying to be a prude here--I like Swift's scatological poems, and Joyce's Ulysses and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, which both have passages that deal with similar, uh, material--but the frequent passages like the above seem indicative of a kind of facile Freudianism (one that's unfair to Freud), which permeates Parallel Stories. One review of the novel, which annoyingly praises Parallel Stories for its "almost Facebook-like approach" also claims that what is remarkable about the book is how it makes "you painfully more aware of your physical body." Although I suspect this was Nadas's intent, I don't think it justifies the ceaseless repetition of passages like the above, and, moreover, the fact is that Nadas's focus on the body, with a few exceptions, is almost always scatological; in this sense, the book actually ignores most of the body in order to focus on a specific set of bodily processes.


I generally like long and "difficult" books, but there's a danger in calling every long and difficult book brilliant simply because of its length and difficulty. Parallel Stories is not a disaster on the level of Harold Brodkey's Runaway Soul, but neither is it a book on par with The Recognitions or 2666. Like many other long books that display brilliance, but aren't complete successes--and I'm thinking of books like William Gass's The Tunnel and Joshua Cohen's Witz, which both veer between the enlightened and the simply tedious--there's no point in attempting to ignore Parallel Stories' significant flaws. And, to me, viewing such work uncritically also gives ammunition to those anti-intellectual readers who believe only pretentious snobs enjoy reading "difficult" books...


Anyway, I am still hoping to finish Parallel Stories, but given my experience thus far, it's probably something I will return to now and then over the course of the next year, rather than feeling compelled to read all of it at once.