Lars Iyer's Blog, page 64

In some sense. For me, what writers up until the period of late modernism could rely upon was the prestige implicit in the idea of literature. What contemporary writers, in my view, need to contend with, is the marginality of literature within our culture. Kafka did not believe in religion but he could still believe in art. That same belief in art today, if not grotesque, is based upon a great capacity for denial.

I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost.

— Nan Goldin, in Couples and Loneliness

via Time Immemorial

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

— Late fragment, Raymond Carver

via Time Immemorial

Press Kit interview for EXODUS

At its core, what would you say Exodus is about?

Exodus is my attempt at a ‘big’ book, a kind of comic Book of Revelations, its philosophy-lecturer characters careening through Britain in the midst of the financial collapse of the late 2000s. Inspired by a range of maverick thinkers – including Žižek, Badiou and Dolar, who feature in the novel – its protagonists dream of taking a fierce last stand against the forces of capitalism, which are arrayed against the life of the mind. Is it really easier to imagine the end of the world than getting rid of capitalism? Anticipating the Occupy movement, and the British student demonstrations of 2011, Exodus is a love letter to would-be thinkers and maverick utopians everywhere.

Where did the idea for the trilogy come from?

W. and Lars are characters I developed as comic relief on my philosophy blog. I meant them to amuse my friends, including the real-life prototype of W. But they began to draw a much broader audience, and I decided that they deserved their own book – and even a series of books – which, although constantly rooted in the cartoon-like intellectual slapstick of the characters, would also bear upon larger concerns.

Why did you decide to write a trilogy? Do the three books need to be read in sequence, or can a reader pick up Dogma or Exodus?

Why a trilogy? I felt that the exuberance of the characters merited more than one book. And there’s the exuberance of the style, too, as crazed as that of Dr Seuss, which is able to encompass virtuosic insult, apocalyptic lament, choice quotations from favourite writers, lyrical accounts of the great thinkers, and potted histories of capital flight and industrial decline. I had a sense that the delirium of my books might measure up to the delirium of our times. That’s what led me from the pared-down settings of Spurious to the much more expansive panorama of Britain in Exodus.

There’s no need for the novels to be read in sequence. Each of them (and pretty much each part of them) is a fractal of the whole. From section to section in my novels, I wanted to retain the immediacy of a daily strip-cartoon like Charles Schultz’s Peanuts, in which characters and situations would have to reveal themselves very quickly to their audience.

How do you feel about the frequent comparisons to Beckett that you've received from critics?

Who wouldn’t be flattered to be compared to Beckett? There are similarities indeed between my trilogy and Beckett’s Godot: both concern a pair of bantering frenemies, eternally wavering between hope and despair. But my novels are more fixed in a particular place and a time than Beckett’s fiction. They’re part of a postmodern age, an age of mass media, in a way that Beckett’s are not. My characters surf the ‘net and play computer games. They read gossip magazines and watch trash TV. These are not incidental details. My characters are very much on our side of the great mountain range of modernism.

I would make a similar claim with respect to the flattering comparisons which have been made between my work and Thomas Bernhard’s. My characters, unlike his, are engulfed in ‘low’ culture. They experience the distance between the contemporary world and the life of the mind much more acutely. The intellectual pursuits of W. and Lars are that much more absurd, that much more anachronistic, because they are undertaken in no supporting context whatsoever. Bernhard satirises Viennese high culture; but in Britain, there is no high culture to satirise. W. and Lars are almost alone in their interest in philosophers like Rosenzweig or Hermann Cohen. The thinker-friends they admire are likewise entirely cut off from contemporary British life. There is pretty much no interest in Britain, academic or otherwise, in the figures W. and Lars venerate.

W. and Lars remind me of Roberto Bolaño’s quixotic characters in The Savage Detectives, who are dedicated to living a poetico-political life – the life of Rimbaud or the Surrealists, the life of the Beat Generation – in a world in which poetry and left-wing politics are utterly irrelevant, and apocalypse waits round the corner. The story I tell of the lost generation of former Essex postgraduates reminds me most of all of the diaspora of Bolaño’s Visceral Realists. W. and Lars are as quixotic, hopeful and deluded as Bolaño’s Robert Belano and Ulysses Lima, driving into the desert. But W. and Lars are not even part of a movement, as Bolaño’s characters were. They’re quite alone... As alone as Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, albeit in very different way.

How do you see the future of philosophy & academia? Is it as bleak as it seems to be in the book?

In the last couple of years, we have adopted the U.S. model of higher education in Britain, effectively privatising the university, and vastly increasing fees. Graduates will be burdened with huge debt, and people from poorer backgrounds have been discouraged from academic study. In Britain, there’s another twist, which Mark Fisher has called ‘market Stalinism’. Bureaucracy and managerialism are rife, and audit-culture has spread throughout the academy. Older models of teaching are being abandoned in favour of a kind of professional training. These are desperate times! End times!

Philosophy, like many other academic disciplines, is under pressure. Many philosophy programmes have closed or face closure, and not because of a lack of demand among students to study the subject. The financial crisis is being used as an excuse for a sinister ‘streamlining’ of humanities subjects. My account of the closure of the humanities in W.’s college, begun in Dogma and continued in Exodus, is modelled on a real-life example. I also mention the scandalous real-life closure of the Department of Philosophy at Middlesex University in the novel.

Arvo Pärt and his wife Nora Pärt, speaking to an interviewer:

N.P.: The last chord in Cantus seems not to want to come to an end. It stands still, without growing or diminishing. Something has been achieved and now one doesn't want to let it go. The content of the entire work strives toward this point. When the plateau of this cadence has been reached the chord does not want to stop. The same thing happens at the end of the first part of Tabula Rasa: always this final chord that appears to want to go on forever.

[...] A.P.: I believe the sacred texts are still 'contemporary'. Seen in this light there are no significant differences between yesterday, today and tomorrow because there are truths that maintain their validity. Mankind feels much the same today as he did then and has the same need to free himself from his faults. The texts exist independently of us and are waiting for us: each of us has a time when he will find a way to them.

[...] A.P.: It is possible that the people who follow my music with interest hope to find something in it. Or perhaps there are people who, like me, are in search of something and when listening to my music, feel that it is moving in the same direction as they are.

If there's one dream that never left me, whatever I've written, it's the dream of writing something that has the form of a diary. Deep down, my desire to write is the desire for an exhaustive chronicle. What's going through my head? How can I write fast enough to preserve everything that's going through my head? I've sometimes started keeping notebooks, diaries again, but each time I abandoned them [...]. But it's the biggest regret of my life, since the thing I'd like to have written is just that: a 'total' diary.

Derrida, interviewed

Arvo Pärt: As you can see, we are dealing once more with the concept of spirituality. By spirituality I do not mean something mystic, but something in fact quite ordinary. There are different attitudes - a very negative way of thinking, and another attitude that sees everything in a positive light. Old music and art teach us to see things from the second of these two perspectives. This is the way Fra Angelico painted, for example, in representing the Day of Judgement. Naturally hell is shown, but even this seems to be imbued with sanctity, and here hell is simply some 'added colour'. For other painters that came later, hell was a real place, but heaven was not so pure as that of Fra Angelico.

In this context the words of Peter Brook occur to me: I am thinking of his comments on the legendary Aix-en-Provence production of Don Giovanni. He said that the miracle of Mozart consists in the way he never condemns anyone, how in his work he accompanies his protagonists lovingly and with equal generosity and empathy.

HTMLGiant shine the 'Author Spotlight' on me for a review/ interview. Grant Maierhofer asked the questions.