Lars Iyer's Blog, page 67

... you write because you do not know what you want to say. Writing reveals to you what you wanted to say in the first place. In fact, it sometimes constructs what you want or wanted to say. What it reveals (or asserts) may be quite different from what you thought (or half-thought) you wanted to say in the first place. That is the sense in which one can say that writing writes us. Writing shows or creates (and we are not always sure we can tell one from the other) what our desire was, a moment ago.

[on his early years] ... as I remember those days, it was with a continual feeling of self-betrayal that I did not write. Was it paralysis? Paralysis is not quite the word. It was more like nausea: the nausea of facing the empty page, the nausea of writing without conviction, without desire. I think I knew what beginning would be like, and balked at it. I knew that once I had truly begun, I would have to go through with the thing to the end. Like an execution: one cannot walk away, leaving the victim dangling at the end of a rope, kicking and choking, still alive. One has to go all the way.

I do believe in sparseness [...] Spare prose and a spare, thrifty world: it's an unattractive part of my makeup that has exasperated people who have to share their lives with me.

I should add that Beckett's later short fictions have never really held my attention. They are, quite literally, disembodied. Molloy was still a very embodied work. Beckett's first after-death book was The Unnamable. But the after-death voice there still has body, and in that sense was only halfway to what he must have been feeling his way toward. The late pieces speak in post-mortem voices. I am not there yet. I am still interested in how the voice moves the body, moves in the body.

[Nabokov]  was proud of his family and his family history. His childhood in Russia was clearly a time of unforgettable happiness. His love and his longing for that departed world are plain in his work; they are what is most engaging in him. But I am not sure he approached the reality that took Russia away from him in a responsible way, in a way that did justice to his native gifts [...] That is why, I think, I have lost interest in Nabokov: because he balked at facing the nature of his loss in its historical fullness.

[On the influence of film and photography on The Heart of the Country:] There was a moment in the course of high modernism when first poets, then novelists, realised how rapidly narration should be carried out: films that used montage effectively were connecting short narrative sequences into longer narratives much more swiftly and deftly than the nineteenth century novelist had thought possible, and they were educating their younger audience too into following rapid transitions, an audience that then carried this skill back into reading texts.

... like children shut in the playroom, the room of textual play, looking out wistfully through the bars at the enticing world of the grownups, one that we have been instructed to think of as the mere phantasmal world of realism but that we stubbornly can't help thinking of as the real.

Writing is not free expression. There is a true sense in which writing is dialogic: a matter of awakening the countervoices in oneself and embarking upon speech with them. It is some measure of a writer's seriousness whether he does evoke/invoke those countervoices in himself, that is, step down from the position of what Lacan calls 'the subject supposed to know'.

... contemporary criticism has become very much a variety of philosophizing.

Stories are defined by their irresponsibility: they are, in in the judgement of Swift's Hoynhnhms, 'that which is not'. The feel of writing fiction is one of freedom, of irresponsibility, or, better, of responsibility toward something that has not yet emergeed, that lies somewhere at the end of the road.

[On Foe:] Friday is mute, but Friday does not disappear, because Friday is body. If I look back over my own fiction, I see a simple (simple-minded?) standard erected. That standard is the body. Whatever else, the body is not 'that which is not', and the proof that it is is the pain in feels. The body with its pain becomes a counter to the endless trials of doubt.

... it is not that one grants the authority of the suffering body: the suffering body takes this authority: that is its power. To use other words: its power is undeniable.

Violence, as soon as I sense its presence within me, becomes introverted as violence against myself: I cannot project it outward. I am unable to, or refuse to, conceive of a liberating violence[....] I understand the crucifixion as a refusal and an introversion of retributive violence, a refusal so deliberate, so conscious, and so powerful that it overwhelms any reinterpretation, Freudian, Marxian, or whatever, that we can give it.

... as Flaubert observed, popular literature tends to be the most literary of all.

Coetzee in dialogue with David Atwell

Pietro Caviglia reviews Magma (the Italian version of Spurious) at Iyezine.

Irene Mazzali reviews Magma at Mangialibri.

And now at last the Earth was dead. The final pitiful survivor had perished. All the teeming billions; the slow aeons; the empires and civilizations of mankind were summed up in this poor twisted form—and how titanically meaningless it had all been! Now indeed had come an end and climax to all the efforts of humanity—how monstrous and incredible a climax in the eyes of those poor complacent fools in the prosperous days! Not ever again would the planet know the thunderous tramping of human millions—or even the crawling of lizards and the buzz of insects, for they, too, had gone. Now was come the reign of sapless branches and endless fields of tough grasses. Earth, like its cold, imperturbable moon, was given over to silence and blackness forever.

The stars whirred on; the whole careless plan would continue for infinities unknown. This trivial end of a negligible episode mattered not to distant nebulae or to suns new-born, flourishing, and dying. The race of man, too puny and momentary to have a real function or purpose, was as if it had never existed. To such a conclusion the aeons of its farcically toilsome evolution had led.

The bitter, the hollow and - haw! haw! - the mirthless. The bitter laugh laughs at that which is not good, it is the ethical laugh. The hollow laugh laughs at that which is not true, it is the intellectual laugh. Not good! Not true! Well, well. But the mirthless laugh is the dianoetic laugh, down the snout - haw! - so. It is the laugh of laughs, the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, the saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs - silence please - at that which is unhappy.

Beckett, Watt

That Manifesto of mine appears in Portuguese translation in edition 12 of the Brazilian magazine Serrote.

I keep company with Godard, Keiller, Angelopolous and Krasznahorkai in Nick Cain's 12 things from 2012, in the end-of-year edition of The Wire.

[On why she admires some authors rather than others:] I think too that I need a brazier of historical experience, a horizon of events, to sense a centre of political suffering, as is the case for Lispector, Akhmatova, Tsvetayeva, Bachmann. (Woolf doesn't lack this, but she comes from the same milieu as Proust, and within me there's a little Jewish girl who feels so removed from these social classes ...

[On the sense that her work has offspring among contemporary writers:] I think of this often, telling myself that my future library is already in place, I can hear the breath of works already formed, that will extend beyond my death, and for me, this is happiness, this adds life to my life. 'To have children' late in life is a wonderful experience! It made Sarah laugh and thrilled Abraham. It's miraculous. One wants to be proud but once can only be humble. For one is not the cause of these marvellous 'descendants', nor the condition, but only the first person, more or less, to see the great future approaching, at which one will not be present, but where one will be recollected, kept by a person in whom one is glad to be continued.

The proofs and their correction: there you touch upon a sore point: I have never dared to continue working at this stage. I feel it's utterly forbidden by editorial reprobation; I know how much it costs. Even when I correct minimally, I apologise profusely in the margins. I don't feel at home any more once the proofs arrive, I am a guest (same with the plays, as soon as rehearsals begin, I have no more rights).

[On titling her books:] ... since the title doesn't come along until after the book, coming from it, and sometimes very late [...], it escapes from the book like a sigh, a sigh of regret. Or a burst of laughter. The book could get along without it. Then it accepts the yoke, while trying to play with it to the limit. Shake it up. Then it submits to the judgement of God, which liberates it from its submission.

 [...] there will always be 'the two worlds' [...] once, hence, the dominant, the one which is now the globalizer; the other, the impure, the hounded out, the marginalised, the 'filthy' of the clean, and which is composed of people or classes considered, on the political level, as the 'damned' of the period; but - and this matters a great deal to me - also on the cultural level composed of the 'rich' in spirit, the intolerable, the poets, philosophers, seekers of the absolute, all those whose sources of delight are found at pretty inaccessible altitudes, who live on languages, and who have found Kleist's second innocence, who desired not power but the poem, and who are hated or feared because they are not aligned and don't conform to the spirit of imitation and predation.

... the time-detached, the dead outliving those who are the inhabitants of literature.

The Bible is everywhere and from the beginning and 'naturally' present in what I write, myths, themes, leitmotivs, songs, promised lands, philosophemes. I am 'at home' in it as in the desert and with God, that is with the need of and the lack of God.

Texts that are broken, fleeting, correspond surely also to urgencies of flight, caused by the pursuit of or dream of a subject which shimmers and sweeps me along but which can't and musn't be taken, grasped, captured.

I write 'a book' and this book lodges itself within me, a passerby, a guest, it exists in flesh and words; and I get to know this complex, composed but unique being, creature. I discover it as we go along. Its vital, animal part is very strong. Moroever it uses my body to make a body, members, for itself, to increase and divide itself into characters. As when I dream and people, at times complete strangers, populate me and I myself become a novel of a kind, in which I am myself a character who has heaps of adventures, and assault and battery.

from Helene Cixous, Frederic-Yves Jeannet, Encounters

... literature is the infinite of the finite.

... Yves Berger, Bernard Fasquelle took the book (Le prenom de Dieu), a 'crazy' book, and Dedans. I published these books 'looking the other way' because I didn't think they were books.

Dedans [...] I was a little embarrassed by, aware that I hadn't written a book but a mangled 'thing'.

I was absolutely not part of [the world of prestigious iterary awards - L.I.]. There were parties and I wasn't there, I was in the hospital, out of it; I didn't see where I was headed, I saw a pit in place of my life.

Neutre was the supreme effort to dig up the secret. All I did was shift it to another grave.

Angst, to my way of thinking, but I may be wrong, is less a new direction than an attempt to conclude: I told myself, really, that if I didn't get to the root of Angst (anguish), the mortal divinity that was persecuting me, I would die, I suffered too much from repeated Angst. So I engaged it as a battle. Of course I wasn't hoping to win, the main thing in a battle is to fight it, to free oneself, in acting, from the misery of passivity. So I didn't win, but I painted its portrait.

... I can't write without feeling I am wronging all the people to whom I owe my life, and the time, to write.

... I never have any idea, either of the theme or of the object, I have only a law: head for whatever is the most frightening. To that which I cannot and do not want to write face-to-face.

As far as time, the duration goes - as I told you, I cannot write except uninterruptedly: it's impossible: hence in a trance. Otherwise I'd be sidetracked by resistances and fears. I only write red-hot, in convulsions, it's highly physical, it's exhausting, it's a gallop, I write ten hours straight, I collapse, but with paper, I don't stop, when I am too tired, I take notes in the evening, at night so as to start fresh, as if heading off to battle, at daybreak, and I do this for two months. During this time I keep in mind the book's landscape or land, its mental map, its armies, its armoires, scraps of sentences, images, dreams, its passages. But not its 'whole', not its composition. This I don't know, I discover. For the same reason, as soon as the 'book' 'ends' it withdraws like a tide, and I no longer remember anything.

from Helene Cixous, Frederic-Yves Jeannet, Encounters

Pitchfork: Finally, I have a question a friend of mine supplied. Someone at her college had a radio show called “Songs of the Apocalypse”, and she was curious what would be on your show, if you put together something called “Songs of the Apocalypse”.

David Tibet: Funny, instead of the obvious choices, the song that immediately comes to mind is “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes; that and “Remember (Walking in the Sand)” by the Shangri La’s. I love girl groups— I particularly love Ronnie Spector— and the idea of apocalypse, the original Greek word meaning, “unveiling,” is where everything is revealed. Now, of course, it has the sense of Armageddon and total destruction, but I still look at it as a total unveiling, the taking off of all masks, and the return, perhaps after the Armageddon, to that state of pristine purity and innocence and love, which is the natural human condition.

When I listen to “Be My Baby” I hear such yearnings and such love and such beauty— that absolutely simple, uncynical love that can and should exist between people— it makes me think of everything [being] stripped away. It’s an absolutely naked, heartbreaking plea for love.

“Walking in the Sand”, of course, has a darker sense to it; that sense of finality and ending which is also apocalyptic— although, again, in contemporary culture there’s this confusion between apocalypse and Armageddon. But if we’re referring to the unveiling of all the masks and lies and deceits and clothes that the soul has covered itself with, it has to be “Be My Baby”.

David Tibet, interviewed (Via Signs in the Stars)

Download MH Spurious A to Z 3

Above, an A to Z of Spurious I wrote to introduce the novel.