Lars Iyer's Blog, page 14

New review of Wittgenstein Jr by Dimitris Passas at Tap the Line. 

New postcast interview with Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau for Bad Vibes Club.

"Which is more painful," I asked him, "writing or not writing?"

"They're both painful, but the pain is different."

He spoke a little about the different sorts of pain, the pain of being unable to write, the pain of writing itself, and ��� as bad as any ��� the pain of finishing what he'd begun. I said, "If the work is so painful when one does it and so painful when it's done, why on earth does anyone do it?"

This was one of those questions that caused him, as I've mentioned already,to disappear behind his hand, covering his eyes and bending his head toward the table for what must have been two full minutes. Then, just when I'd begun to suspect that he'd fallen asleep, he raised his head and, with an air of relief, as if he'd finally resolved a lifelong dilemma, whispered, "The fashioning, that's what it is for me, I think. The pleasure in making a satisfactory object." He explained that the main excitement in writing had always been technical for him, a combination of "metaphysics and technique." "A problem is there and I have to solve it. Godot, for example, began with an image ��� of a tree and an empty stage ��� and proceeded from there. That's why, when people ask me who Godot is, I can't tell them. It's all gone."

"Why metaphysics?" I said.

"Because," he said, "you've got your own experience. You've got to draw on that."

He tried to describe the work he wanted to do now. "It has to do with a fugitive 'I' [or perhaps he meant 'eye']. It's an embarrassment of pronouns. I'm searching for the non-pronounial."

"'Non-pronounial.'?"

"Yes. It seems a betrayal to say 'he' or 'she.'"

from Exorcising Beckett, by Lawrence Shainberg

The Will to Posture

An affectionate satire on a life of grand philosophical thinking

Lars Iyer���s Nietzsche and the Burbs is the story of a suburban sixth-former so enthralled by proto-existentialist philosophy, and by ���nihilism��� in particular, that it consumes his life: he doesn���t do chit-chat or gossip; only the biggest talk will do (���So what should we do? Art asks. What should we want?���). He blogs (���Suburban events: eternally larval, eternally on the brink of happening. Suburban time deepens���). The local gang of outsidery, intellectualish teenagers take him on as their leader and spiritual guide (and lead singer of their band), nicknaming him Nietzsche and quickly coming around to the nihilist lifestyle themselves. Very markedly its premiss recalls that of Iyer���s previous novel, Wittgenstein Jr (2014), the story of a Cambridge professor of logic and the students who call him ���Wittgenstein���.

This young Nietzsche���s life tracks that of the real Friedrich so closely that he starts to seem like a kind of Nietzschean reincarnation (perhaps just one of his eternal returns). Nietzsche struggles with his mental health, loathes his overbearing sister, falls for a girl called Lou (Salom��?), competing for her affections with a friend called Paula (R��e?), and eventually collapses into madness, to be cared for by his sister, delighted to find him under her control. (One wonders, though, why our hero, well versed in the real Nietzsche���s work, isn���t a bit more alarmed by all the weird similarities in his own life.)

The novel covers ten weeks in the lives of these sixth-formers, as they attempt to forge their identities, figure out romance, pass their exams and gaze into the endless post-school summer that will bridge their pasts and futures, conveyed in lyrical and often moving passages. And at the same time, it is an affectionate satire on intellectual life and a certain sort of grand philosophical thinking. With a kind of Nietzschean flair, Iyer illuminates the ways in which strongly held beliefs are often the product not of a ���cold, pure, divinely unperturbed dialectic��� (as Nietzsche wrote) but (as he continued) of a ���desire of the heart sifted and made abstract���; and so the philosophical speculation that Iyer���s young protagonist expounds is born from his descent into misery, and that of his friends springs from their desire to feel superior to their fellow suburbanites.

Iyer���s prose is immersive, dominated by dialogue, and his plot is recursively repetitious (in the way that schooldays and revision are). The almost formless story is given order by precise time markers: the novel is broken down into weeks, each broken into days. Individual passages, read in isolation ��� with the friends��� meandering yet pugnacious ruminations, interspersed with bursts of sweary rudeness ��� form sharp, witty vignettes of bright teenagers grasping for meaning:

I like his death-to-the-world stuff, not his God stuff, Art says.

You can���t have one without the other, Paula says. Why do we have to believe in anything? I ask. Why can���t we just accept the world as it is?

Look around you, doofus, Art says. The world���s a shithole.

We don���t believe in the world: that���s the problem, Paula says. We don���t believe in anything.

So we���ve got to become religious again? I ask.

But with paragraph after paragraph of this stuff, chapter after chapter, it starts to feel relentless. Whole sections are dedicated to the friends��� opinions on their new, radical approach to music:

Music as open as the sky. Like the sea beneath the sky. Music mirroring the sky ��� This is what it means to Order. We���re continuing the Creation ��� We���re furthering the Creation ��� A controlled explosion. Energy, cascading. Energy, shaped.

At times it shifts from the merely tedious to the almost insufferable. What a relief when a character outside the core ���nihilist��� group gets a line: ���Nietzsche ��� is that what you call him? Tana asks. Jesus. He���s a philosopher, I say. A philosopher of the suburbs. You guys are full of shit, Tana says���.

Why do I have such an interest/morbose fascination for the literature on climate change and generally the imminent planetary collapse? Is it because my strong morals impose upon me to deeply care for all human beings on earth and their fate? No. Let���s be honest. It���s because if the world is really going to go to shit in a few decades, the fact that my life was wasted can quietly slide into the background, and I can resort to the ultimate psychological palliative strategy: ���oh well, no matter how realized I might have been, the world was fucked anyway���. Pathetic, I know. Hi, have you met me?

Brilliant essay by an ex-philosophy academic.

'Nihilism, the Suburbs and Redemptive Music': New interview with Austin Hayden Smith and Troy Polidori on the podcast Owls at Dawn. Starts about 29 minutes in and lasts for 30 minutes or so. 

Long new written interview with Zac Smith at Vol.1 Brooklyn.

Long new interview with Zac Smith at Vol.1 Brooklyn.

Stuart Kelly reviews Nietzsche and the Burbs for The Scotsman.

There is an old puzzle about writing. Can you write a novel about boredom that is not boring, or a novel about pornography that is not pornographic? The latest of Lars Iyer���s philosophically nuanced books produces a similar impasse. Can you write about pretentious teenagers and not be arch and a bit adolescent? Can you find meaning in the lack of meaning? In many ways this is a startling and often very funny and well-observed novel. It is also somewhat frustrating, but being frustrated is part of the point of it all.

The novel begins with a quartet of self-conscious misfits, Chandra, Paula, Merv and Art (yes, the name has significance) who define themselves by not being in with the brutes, the trendies or the drudges. They have a band, but cannot decide on its genre, despite having a vision. This seems an apt metaphor for the novel itself. Into the group arrives a new pupil, whom they nickname Nietzsche. The first few pages are full of nicknames, which are both derogatory and slightly envious. Nietzsche has been transferred from the posh private school into the local state school, with a shadow of glamour and despair around why. He also advocates nihilism. The school is in Wokingham, and it seems that he is going to awaken the place.

Iyer has previously written a trilogy of books about a philosophy lecturer (Spurious, Dogma and Exodus) and Wittgenstein Jr ��� a good book, but not a patch on Thomas Bernhard���s Wittgenstein���s Nephew. This may seem like a continuation of a particular style, but its virtues lie elsewhere. There are plenty of knowing references for those that know: Nietzsche gets a girlfriend called Lou (a nod at Lou Salom��, with whom the real Nietzsche was infatuated), he has a domineering and self-serving older sister (again, a reference to Elizabeth Nietzsche, who co-opted her brother���s legacy to Nazism), and, of course, there is an inevitable breakdown brooding just over the horizon. The idea of the foursome having a band already is a way to look at Nietzsche���s own obsession with music ��� his own is passable, but his love-hate affair with Wagner more interesting. Since they are all sixth-formers there is a lot about ecstatic, drunken Dionysius and much less about the severe Apollonian. Readers who know the work of the real Nietzsche will no doubt have a snicker when phrases like ���human, all too human��� or ���eternal recurrence��� or �����bermensch��� or ���God is dead��� appear. They aren���t the only literary allusions: Beckett, Cioran and Dostoyevsky all get name-checked, and perhaps the best joke is when a character asks if there is ���An Idiot���s Guide to The Idiot���.

In a way, these philosophical curlicues are not as interesting as the book���s virtues. It is very good on the elation and lassitude of being a teenager, especially in the intense friendships which one knows are brittle and not going to last. It is touching in its depiction of the hierarchies, bullying and moral apathy of the young. It can be properly comical when the now-quintet of sixth-formers make snarky remarks to their teachers or pose them difficult questions. Parts of these sections are almost like a grunge version of Lucky Jim, although I suspect Iyer would rather be compared to Martin Amis than Kingsley Amis.

Where the novel truly shines is in its analysis of suburbia, the other half of the title. It is not merely a re-run of the notorious lines by John Betjeman (���Come, merry bombs and fall on Slough / It isn���t fit for humans now���), nor is it an elegiac psychogeography in the vein of Iain Sinclair or Will Self. It is keenly observed, describing the mediocre modernity of new build estates. At the same time there is a form of tenderness in suburbia. ���Nietzsche��� says that ���Everyone used to believe in betterment��� and that ���there���s only the sheer positivity of the suburbs in their infinite sprawl���. It is worth noting that one subplot involves cancer, and like cancer, the suburbs grow and are immortal. The teenagers rage at the homogeneity of the suburbs, and yet the novel suggests a world without difference, of equality, might also be found in the burbs. They yearn for some kind of apocalypse.

Stylistically, the novel takes its key from Nietzsche himself, in that I can���t recollect reading a book with as many ���!���s and ���?���s. It also has a hallucinatory repetition. I can see the point, but it can be wearisome. Iyer���s previous works have been lithe, and although there is a meaning behind the recurrences and repeats here, it is a meaning that in some ways battles against the reader.

Yet there is a human heart here, with some beautifully done cadenzas on love, on loneliness, on the self-absorbing and endlessly cycling ennui of being on the cusp of school and whatever-comes-next. By the way: the protagonists cycle the whole time (another pun), but the real Nietzsche thought he could only think when walking.

Calum Barnes reviews Nietzsche and the Burbs at The Morning Star:

Witty novel on the blank millennial midset

IN HIS book American Utopia, Fredric Jameson argues that the high-school drama is a utopian genre, depicting a world where all material needs are met and there is no need to work.

It is into this idyllic realm, with its cycle of eternal recurrence, that Lars Iyer releases Friedrich Nietzsche. He lands him in a high school in the sleepy town of Wokingham in the south east of England to preach the consolations of nihilistic philosophy.

Like Iyer's previous fiction, Nietzsche and the Burbs is a novel of ideas. But it departs from his usual university setting to a high school more recognisably rooted in our world rather than the rarefied life of the mind.

When the shy, introspective protagonist is dropped from the local private school and ends up at the nearby sixth-form college, he finds himself falling in with the misfits and losers who nickname him Nietzsche for his bleak, oracular utterances and recruit him as the vocalist for their metal band.

As they rush headlong into their final exam season, they experience the usual sex, drugs and rock and roll one expects to dabble in at the tail end of secondary school. But, rather than gazing at their future with hope and possibility, they are paralysed by the yawning nothingness that lies before them.

They channel their angst into their music, while Nietzsche takes to his blog and one wonders why he doesn't join Twitter, a medium surely perfectly suited to his aphoristic style.

Narrated in Iyer's terse but breezy prose, primarily composed of unpunctuated dialogue, there are plenty of knowing winks to the philosophically literate reader. It becomes evident that Nietzsche's life in Wokingham closely resembles his namesake's in the 19th century, with an overbearing sister and a romantic infatuation with a girl called Lou.

Besides the jocular references to the high priests of pessimism like Thomas Bernhard and EM Cioran, the levity is freighted by the gloomy lectures of Old Mole, the pupils' economics teacher, predicting the collapse of capitalism.

This is not only a critical juncture in the lives of these high-school students but for the world as it hurtles towards climate emergency, aided and abetted by a destructive economic system.

In his final project on the stultifying suburbs, Nietzsche remarks that while they seem impossible to escape, a reversal can occur, when the impossible becomes possible and an escape route opens, not to another world but to right here, where we already are.

Iyer's rollicking coming-of-age tale entertainingly demonstrates how Gramsci's old call for a pessimism of the intellect is necessary to reveal the latent utopian possibilities of our world in the here and now.