Lars Iyer's Blog, page 83

Pálido Fuego will will publish a Spanish translation of Spurious next year.

FronteiraD publish my manifesto, in Spanish.

The great Enrique Vila-Matas responds to the manifesto, in El Pais. 

Rough translation of Vila-Matas's piece (thanks Ellie!):

He says he was recently at a signing alongside a young guy who had written a book called 'A guide for bald people', and asked him what it was about. The guy unashamedly said 'it's a joke book', at which point Vila-Matas realised that he was a TV star, and that all the people queueing were there to see him. At one point this guy turned to Vila-Matas and said 'I'm here so they can see me'. And Vila-Matas thought: 'precisely.' At the exact moment that writers start to be 'seen', everything is lost.

He started thinking about the degradation of literature over the centuries, and how it's all come to this. Then he says that the end of literature is the central axis of 'Nude in your hot tub' by the young British novelist Lars Iyer. Then he summarises Lars's essay, pretty directly, so I won't translate that.

Vila-Matas says that the problem is that all people who write these days are called writers, though there's nothing else linking a writer of joke books to a writer in the old sense. Some try to explain this collapse by talking about writers' abandonment of moral responsibility, but that argument is insufficient. Though it's true that most writers today work with rather than against capitalism and market forces, it's also true that liberal democracies, by tolerating and absorbing everything, make texts useless, as dangerous as that may seem.

Everything's really already over when it comes to literature, he says, though thankfully you can still qualify that statement. Prose now is a commodity, and so, though interesting/distinguished/respected, it's irredeemably insignificant. But we still look for ways out, because now and again a writer comes along who captures the gravity of the moment, whose writing is absurd, exasperated, sick, but also authentic. These people are crazy, maniacs, the heirs of yesterday's hopeless misanthrope writers, but their works are honest and have a liberating power.

Some of these great writers: Beckett, Bernhard, Bolano. Talks about Beckett's irony, his characters' success in failure.

He quotes Lars on Bernhard. Says that losers making music for losers also points to literature's chance of survival.

Then he says: 

I'm listening to you, reader, and I won't deny that the party's almost over and that the black sky is indifferent to us all; but imagine, for a moment, that you take this last path that's left to literature. You're with the people of your own music at the last frontier, lost in the Sonoran desert, for example, at the end of all searching, or in Gatsby's gothic library, and your name is Owl Eyes and you're that guy with the thick lenses who wanders around dazed after discovering to his shock that Gatsby's books aren't fake.

Let's also suppose that there's a full moon and banjos in the garden.

"'Can't you see them?' you say. "I've checked. They're real."

Unexpected phrases like this, although charged with an exaltation at survival, make up the disturbed music of losers: phrases that are like soft, silent squalls, uttered for uncertain times, though not as uncertain as they would have us believe.

FronteiraD publish my manifesto, in Spanish.

The great Enrique Vila-Matas responds to the manifesto, in El Pais. 

Pálido Fuego will will publish a Spanish translation of Spurious next year.

I am not preoccupied with the characteristics of my works or my person, insofar as it is related to my works; that is, I am not preoccupied with anything personal. If I can speak about anyone’s defencelessness, it is not mine, but that of those who are very far from being able to formulate this sense of defencelessness. If you feel that I am an outsider in any sense, this obviously comes from the fact that my heroes, or rather, the constant object of my train of thought, The One Who Is Always the Same Person, is indeed outside society, because my gaze works in such a way that I can see him and only him in a mass of people, it is only his eyes that meet mine, only his, whose glance betrays that no social force or fear or instinct can keep him inside—he is the expelled son, the one who was thrown away.

Someone who scolds the world constantly and with such volcanic force as Bernhard may easily deceive us, but it gradually turns out what it is all about. Bernhard appreciated greatness, genius, the power of thought and the creative triumphs of the human spirit. He appreciated and adored them. Bernhard was an enthusiast. That is why he hated whatever was not great, whatever was not a work of genius. 

My books are for those who read them. Therefore the fact that I intend them for anyone at all is not so important. However, those that I ‘intend’ my books for are all kinds of people, but they are definitely not aristocratic, definitely not part of the social elite, you can take my word for that. On the contrary, those I have been thinking of are far from being chosen ones, but exactly the opposite: they are those who will not be chosen but rather expelled, because they are injured, defenceless, oversensitive; they are those who drop out of the great Stirring Machine at the first turn. Perhaps you could reformulate this by saying that those we are talking about are the elite of the injured, the aristocracy of those who are helpless beyond recovery… This sounds different, doesn’t it? And as for me offering my works to them—I would rather say that they are The Ones Who Are Always the Same Person, the constant subjects of my thinking. I am immensely grateful to them. Without them, readers would not even understand what I am doing. Without them, it would not occur to me to write anything. They are there partly, at least in a tiny fragment, in all of my readers. 

Krasznahorkai, interviewed

I’m personally involved in the apocalypse… It’s interesting how your relationship to that changes in the course of your life. You think about it most when you’re young, particularly in connection with death, because you still have a certain courage that you’re going to lose when your own death is getting closer. Later you’re just afraid. When I was young, I didn’t feel the sanctity of birth. I tended to consider birth as the starting point of a journey toward failure, and I’d sadly look out the window for days on end into this grey light that was all that had been given to me. Anything that could arouse compassion had a great impact on me. I was particularly responsive to those aspects of reality and the arts that reflected sadness, the unbearable, the tragic. And I didn’t know what to do with anything positive or joyful. Happiness bothered me.

I generally spend my days alone, I don’t talk much; but when I do, then I talk a lot and continuously, never ending a sentence. Many people are like that. You may notice that the majority of people talk the way I write.

Perhaps young people are the hardest to influence; perhaps they like to be seen as free, and they like it even more if they see someone confronting anything and anyone for their sake. For them, nothing has been decided yet. I think we’re talking about those who haven’t yet decided how to deal with their forebodings, or where to hide their imagination, their desires and their dignity in this rotten world we live in. We’re talking about those for whom a book is not just a book; they know that while we hold on to the book forcefully, there is something before the book and something after the book, and that’s what the book is for.

[...] so-called high literature will disappear. I don’t trust such partial hopes that there will always be islands where literature will be important and survive. I would love to be able to say such pathos-filled things, but I don’t think they’re true.

You’re forgetting that human history is full of catastrophes, and it’s the catastrophes that force people to think. 

When did I laugh last? When I saw and heard you, I laughed for joy. Because of the way you ask questions. Because you care. And because I again have someone to talk to. Someone I can tell these things to.

Bits of an interview with Krasznahorkai

Brave Little Books reviews Spurious.

Scott Pack, Lars Iyer, Elaine Feinstein. Gabriel Gbadamosi chairs.

Reports of the death of the author have been greatly exaggerated. They’re back, and they’re in the news, with fans queuing round the block at signings. Do punditry and promotion make writing a viable profession or distract from the business of writing? Should writers be read but not seen?

Digital novelist and Spurious blogger Lars Iyer, former Head Buyer for Waterstones and HarperCollins publicist Scott Pack, and prize-winning poet Elaine Feinstein greet their public.

Leo Robson, Lars Iyer, Joanna Kavenna. Gabriel Gbadamosi chairs.

What fresh possibilites await the future of the contemporary novel? The 20th century saw Joyce, Beckett and Woolf rewrite the rule book for fiction. But after a glance at the Booker Prize list, you could be forgiven for thinking the revolution had never happened. Was experimental fiction always a flash in the pan, or are we on the cusp of a new period of innovation and discovery?

Philosopher, novelist and blogger Lars Iyer, Orange prize-winning novelist Joanna Kavenna, and New Statesman and FT critic Leo Robson imagine the future of fiction.

http://howthelightgetsin.org/tickets/all-sessions/

We think with our tears, with our sadnesses, W. says. We think from our humiliations, our desperations ...

Thought is the hangman, our hangman, W. says. Thought has its nooses ready, just for us.

Really, thought is a kind of assault, W. says.

To think is to stray. To think is to err greatly: who was it who said that?, W. wonders. Well, there's erring and erring. There's straying and straying.

In the end, thought is dread, W. says. It is indistinguishable from dread.

W. thinks of Trotsky in exile, having been expelled from the Central Committee, expelled from Russia, staying in Turkey, then Paris, then Mexico, writing articles about the betrayal of the revolution, about his hatred of Stalin.

He thinks of Trotsky receiving news of his relatives, killed one by one. His son, poisoned, his daughters, hanged; his brother, shot, his sister, exiled.

He thinks of Trotsky in his Mexican stockade, the sword of Stalin hanging over his head, dreaming of a new revolution, a supplementary one, that would set the Russian revolution back on its course ...

W. thinks of Lenin, after his stroke, being wheeled along in his basket chair, being helped to speak again, to read and write, using alphabet cards and basic exercises.

He thinks of Lenin, his brain dying, a twisted half-smile on his face, no longer able to say the words peasant and worker, people and revolution.

He thinks of Lenin, with only a few months to live, regressed to his second infancy, suffering paralytic attacks and spasms, whispering the nonsense words, vot vot, to express agreement or disagreement, a request or to express frustration. Vot vot, vot vot ...

Philosophy doubles up our suffering, W. says. Not its redemption, but its witness. Philosophy gives sense to suffering in communicating it to others. Speech, dialogue: that’s what overcomes futility. That’s what lays waste to the senselessness of the world.

The word, philosopher, is an honorific, W. says. It's a title that can only be bestowed by others. No one should ever call himself a philosopher. No one has the right. We become philosophers when we speak, W. says. When we address others on matters of importance. We philosophise when we dialogue, W. says. When we take responsibility for our conversation, and drive it to deeper depths.

But when philosophy has no home? When there are no universities in which philosophy can take shelter? The danger is, that we might forget how to speak. The danger is that suffering voices will cry in the darkness, and there will be no one to respond.