Lars Iyer's Blog, page 87

W. has always thought that there are certain thoughts which come to you only in exhaustion, only once you’ve reached the end of your strength.

Hadn’t he reached this point with his friends among the Essex postgraduates time and again? Hadn’t he and his housemates ... discovered the secrets of the universe after drunken nights at the bar?

The trouble is what exhaustion reveals it also keeps to itself, W. says. What could he and his friends remember the next day of what they had discussed? What of the truth that seemed to dawn between them?

It’s different with me, of course, with whom exhaustion leads nowhere. What thoughts have ever come to him after our nights of drinking? What does he remember the next day except for formless horror and for the kind of states only H.P. Lovecraft would know how to name?

‘When do you work?’, W. says. ‘When do you have ideas?’ But he knows the answer. I am too busy to work, I tell him. I am too occupied to have ideas.

He knows what I do all day. He knows I’m busy with bureaucracy and administration. But what about my evenings?

He sees me, in his mind’s eye, opening a bottle of wine in the squalor of my flat after a day at work. He sees me, booting up my laptop, getting ready to write.

My problem is that I think writing about ideas is the same as having ideas, when in reality they are entirely different. You have to stop writing to have an idea, W. says. You have to pause and wait.

Of course, it’s worse for me when I do stop writing, W. says. It’s worse when I collapse into my bed and try to sleep. He pictures me staggering around my flat in the early hours, preparing for bed. He sees me ranging around my flat like the abominable snowman, my dressing gown flapping around me ...

‘You can never sleep, can you? You’ve never been able to sleep’, W says. He sees me in his mind’s eye, lying sleepless in bed, full of great paranoid imaginings about the way I think they’ll sack me. He sees me lying there, quite panicked, fearing that I’ll be sent back to the dole queue. And he sees me falling asleep at last, collapsing into unconsciousness at last, just as dawn begins, and the birds start singing, just as – on the opposite end of the country, W. is waking up, ready to begin work. He sees me dreaming fitfully about working out my notice and exit interviews. He sees me mouthing the words, No!, No!, in my half sleep ... And he sees my eyes open again, the Leviathan awake, rolling out of my bed like a Spital Tongues Gargantua ...

I have no real idea how to read, W. says. No idea how to approach the oeuvre of a great thinker. He knows that it would be too much for me to approach such an oeuvre head on, as he does, simply reading the primary text in the original, line by line, looking up difficult words in a dictionary. And he knows that it’s even too much for me to approach it crabwise, though the work of others, by way of fellow thinkers, contemporaries, who were wrestling with its ideas as they emerged? I have no idea that it might be appropriate to approach an oeuvre from upstream, as it were, gaining a knowledge of the tradition of which it is a past, of the thinkers that influenced its author. Nor, for that matter, have I any clue that I might approach it from downstream, so to speak, reading backwards from the thinkers it influenced in turn.

I have no sense of the reverence of reading, W. says. No sense that I’ve come across something ahead of me, wiser than me, and which should make me sink to my knees. I have no shame as a reader, no sense that of the limits of my comprehension, of the limits of my education. I lack an exegete’s sensitivity, the hermeneut’s delicacy. I lack the tenderness of approach that would allow me to approach an oeuvre as the work of one who has struggled with thought as I should have struggled with thought, as a thought-brother, as a thought-sister, who also sought to make sense of their time, who also sought to let the great questions resound.

In the end, I am only a ransacker of texts, a kind of reader-marauder, W. says. I pillage my way through them like a Viking raiding party. 

W.’s decided to stage an intervention, he says. He’s had enough. He’s going to intervene in my life.

‘Your life is the complete opposite of everything you know is right’, W. says. I’ve taken everything that Blanchot’s done and said and done and said the opposite.

‘When are you going to take philosophy seriously?’, W. says. ‘You haven’t read anything in years. Are you retiring from philosophy?’, he asks. ‘Have you given up?’ I haven’t, I tell him. – ‘Then why don’t you write some philosophy? You have to externalise yourself. You have to experience your shortcomings’.

W. knows my problem: I don’t want to do actual work, W. says. I don’t want to face the sheer anonymity of it all. – ‘No one’s going to pay any attention to you’, he says. ‘No one’s ever going to care what either of us is going to write. But you have to believe you can change things. You have to believe that you can write something great’.

That’s what W. believes, in his heart of hearts, he says: that our collaboration might lead to something great. Why can’t I see it? Why have I given up on him? On us?

It’s not that I don’t write. There’s all my writing on my blog, he says. Writing that is largely about him, of course. W. says this ... W. says that ... No one I actually respect would write anything like that. Do you think Kafka would have a blog? Would Blanchot?

Despite everything, I want to be liked, W. says. That’s my problem. I want an audience. That’s why I’m so deluded about the internet. That’s why I believe so vehemently in the blogosphere. – ‘It’s a way for a maniac like you get some attention’, W. says. The real thinker understands that that kind of attention destroys the possibility of thought, he says. Thinkers have to be obscure, W. says. Kafka was obscure. No one knew anything about him. Blanchot was obscure. The thinker has to become imperceptible: didn’t Deleuze and Guattari say that? The writer has to be el hombre invisible: didn’t Burroughs write that?

He knows all about my nosebleeds, W. says. He’s seen enough of them.

He remembers my Freiburg nosebleed. I appalled the Germans, W. says. I horrified them. He remembers my great American nosebleeds. I bled in Nashville, in a faux honky-tonk bar. And then I bled in Memphis in a faux blues bar. Bar tenders brought me tissues. Preppies looked away ... And haven’t I told him of my nosebleeds of my days as a temporary contractor in Bracknell? The shirts I have soiled ... The office desks ... How many times did they have to let me home early, in disgust? How many times did they ring up my agency to complain?

Blood running from my nose ... Blood pooling in my philtrum, and along the top of my lips, my great fat lips ... Blood colouring my teeth, until I look like a jackal ... Sometimes he sees it as a kind of martyrdom, W. says. I bleed to remember all the suffering in the world, just as Johnny Cash wore black to remember all the suffering in the world. I bleed because others bleed, in some kind of animal sympathy.

Sometimes it sees it as part of my Hinduism, as a part of the streaming of all things. As part of a great Hindu streaming, in which you can see all the gods, all the mortals, the beginning of the universe, and the end. My nosebleeds are cosmic, W. says.

Sometimes, he sees it as a Scandinavian phenomenon, a pagan phenomenon: as a kind of sympathy for Baldur, the bleeding God. It was said that Balder bled because the world had gone dark, and all promise had disappeared. It was said Balder’s wound wouldn’t heal until Ragnarok, at the end of times. And isn’t that the way with my nosebleed, too – that I bleed because our world has gone dark, and because our promise has disappeared. And won’t my nosebleed not stop until the final hour?

Plan A’s collapsed, we agree. So what’s plan B? There is no Plan B. There’s only fantasy after the collapse of Plan A.

‘Show me your reading face’, W. says. ‘Go on. What’s the expression on your face as you read?’ He makes a puzzled face. Is this it? He makes a sad face. Is this it? He scratches his head like Stan Laurel. He makes hooting noises like a chimp.

In my books somebody is talking behind the characters, but it is not me. This hidden person, who uses these books to talk about something through the characters, through these books, before fiction and before every articulated thought, speaks in a crazed, suggestive way, and this kind of speech never needs a period. He talks without pause, without interruption; he talks in that crazy speedy way—if you observe a daily real-life situation in a tense atmosphere, the people also talk with that crazed desire to convince each other, always without punctuation, right? My so-called long sentences don’t come from any idea or personal theory, but from the spoken language. You know, I think the short sentence seems to me like something artificial, affected. We are used to very seldom short sentences. When we speak, we speak fluent, unbroken sentences, and this kind of speech doesn’t need any periods. Only God needs the period—and at the end He will use one, I am sure.

Krasznahorkai, interviewed

Origins of Silence, a review of Dogma by Toby Lichtig from The Times Literary Supplement, April 13 2012, p.22:

The epithet 'Beckettian' is perhaps the most overused in criticism, frequently employed as a proxy for less distinguished designations such as 'sparse' or 'a bit depressing'. But Lars Iyer's fiction richly deserves this appellation. His playfully spare - and wryly depressing - landscape, incorporating a bickering double act on a hopeless, existential journey, is steeped in the bathos, farce, wordplay and metaphysics of the man John Calder referred to as 'the last of the great stoics', its characters accelerating towards a condition of eternal silence, fuelled only by the necessity of speaking out. Other influences abound, self-consciously so, including Franz Kafka and Maurice Blanchot, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Antonio Gramsci; but it is what these thinkers share with Samuel Beckett that stands out: an interest in what might be termed the tragicomic flight of Zeno's arrow.

Following on from Spurious (also the name of his blog), Dogma is the second in Iyer's proposed trilogy of buggering-on-in-spite books, featuring a narrator also called Lars (half Danish, half Hindu) and his splenetic companion W. (half Jewish, half Catholic), vagrant philosophers (where Beckett was fond of philosophical vagrants) bound by a friendship of loving antagonism). Lars and W. shamble around the corridors of academe, attending ever-more futile seminars and lecture tours, and sinking with increasing resolve into degradation, alcoholism and insult. This bullying is superficially one-directional: W. ridicules Lars, but it is Lars who reports this ridicule to us.

Thus we learn that our narrator is (for W.) gauche in his emotions, simian in his manners, stone-age in his intellect, at best a 'savant', at worst 'Scandotrash', 'a squalid man amidst the squalor', a 'Homo Floresiensis of thought', 'an administrator of the spirit', 'fundamentally bureaucratic', 'a petty man, yes; a troubled man, no'. This tool of reported insult, as well as being entertaining, provides a curious sketch of the tormentor himself, a frustrated minor academic who cannot come to terms with the endless disappointments offered by the contemporary life of the mind. W.'s own sense of self-worth (despite his many self-acknowledged talents) is wavering at best, but perception, pace Derrida, being a system of relations, there is thankfully always Lars to buck him up: 'W. feels like Socrates, he says. And I am Diogenes, Socrates's idiot double'. At other times, our narrator merely appears to drag his friend down: 'Somehow I always stand in the way of his beatitude'. The endless affront also serves a higher purpose: it provides a language for the author's exploration of existential crisis.

With their souls in such a parlous state, there is clearly only one thing for it: they must found a new philosophical movement to while away the time between the morass and the apocalypse (an inevitability that Lars, with his Hindu's attitude towards cyclicality, cannot, says W., hope to comprehend). Taking their inspiration from the avant-garde realism of the filmmakers Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, as outlined in their 'Dogma 95' manifesto, W. (with dubious help from Lars) invents 'Dogma', a school of thinking rooted in spartanism, sincerity, collaboration and plagiarism, before expanding its principles to include reticence, alcoholism and something far more violent ('But we got scared and backed out'). The first Dogma presentation, on Kafka, goes well: 'W. spoke very movingly of his encounter with The Castle in a Wolverhampton library. I spoke very ineptly (W. said afterwards) ...'. Further talks on love and friendship lead to fissures: by the eighth lecture 'we were almost incoherent' with drink and for the ninth 'we went to the pub instead'. The fifteenth presentation 'was for our benefit only. We gave it in secret, under cover'. In their babbling, beer-sodden hopelessness, they gradually, and failingly, approach what for Beckett, as for Wittgenstein and Blanchot, one always feels was the preferred option: silence.

Along the way, there is much scope for garrulous reflection on the human condition, fuelled by the characters' (and author's) academic interests, including the (Henri) Lefebvrean conception of 'eternullity', the Blanchotian 'infinite wearing away', the Gramscian crisis ('the old is dying and the new cannot be born') and the Leibnizian differential: 'It is the infinite that founds the infinite and not the finite the infinite - this is why the infinite is not a negative concept'. At times, Iyer's fiction feels more like literary philosophy than philosophical literature, and the relentless metaphysical hammering can wear thin. Ungenerous reviewers might even ask whether we need another quasi-Beckettian prober of the abyss, retreading the old ground between late modernism and poststructuralism with a pair of grim-gay revelation-awaiting no-can-ers and a series of disposable quotations from a doubtless impressive library (Iyer is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and the author of two books on Maurice Blanchot).

Those critics, however, would be ignoring the countless charms of the text. Iyer's fiction isn't likely to change the world but perhaps that's the point, and in the meantime we can be diverted by its irreverence, intelligence and, perhaps above all, its darkly cheerful exploration of friendship. The real joke of the novel is less W.'s cruelty than the fact that Lars retains the upper hand by controlling the reportage. This opposition sustains it, and within it there is sufficient love almost to gesture towards something beyond the void.

Spurious and I: an Interview

  What is Spurious all about?

The novel relates the adventures of two would-be intellectuals, W. and Lars, who have an enthusiasm for the thought and literature of what they call ‘Old Europe’. They meet in their hometowns (Plymouth, Newcastle), undertake a foreign trip (to Freiburg) and head off to various parts of Britain, discussing matters by turn profound and trivial.

Spurious is also a story of ideas - the apocalypse, the Messiah and so on - and writers, Kafka, Rosenzweig and others. And then there’s the damp in Lars’s flat, which has its own story, like the decrepit landscapes the Hungarian film director Béla Tarr likes to film.

Tell me more about the characters of the novel.

There are really only two characters in Spurious: W., Jewish in origin, but a Catholic convert, who teaches in a college in Plymouth, and Lars, Danish-Indian in origin, and a Hindu, who teaches in a university in Newcastle. These friends and collaborators have a strong interest in philosophy and literature, but also a sense of inadequacy with respect to the great figures in these fields. W. thinks of Lars as a kind of failed protégé, who has been utterly unable to deliver on the task W. had set him, that is, to spur W. on to think original and relevant philosophical thoughts. What the characters have in common is a fascination with Old Europe, which names, for them, a kind of paradise, where certain ideas are taken seriously and form part of the intellectual conversations of an age. They look to figures like Kafka and Rosenzweig as exemplars of philosophical and literary commitment.

Why does ‘Old Europe’ mean so much to the characters?

Figures like Kafka and Rosenzweig, who W. and Lars admire, belonged to a culture that took ideas seriously, a culture in which intellectual life was valued, even lionized. Theirs was a period of great authors, and great ideas. The Britain of W. and Lars – the neoliberalised Britain of the 2000s – is very different. Their culture is not an intellectual one. It is not elitist – dfferences between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture have long since been erased. The charisma which surrounded older intellectual figures has disappeared. There is no longer an intransigent vanguard, no longer a securely reactionary bourgeois morality, no longer an academicist establishment for artists and thinkers to rail against. Culture, now, is populist and globalised. The high seriousness of modernism can only seem a posture. W., and, in particular, Lars, are part of this world. Lars seems to relish it: he reads gossip magazines (perhaps only to annoy W.), he plays Doom on his mobile phone. W. is more inclined to struggle against it.

Contemporary Britain isn’t greatly interested in ideas, in particular the ideas that interest W. and Lars, which belong to an entirely different, Old European, context. Nor is contemporary Britain interested in the integrity of Old European thinkers and artists, who seem to embody what they think and create, to live it, and to do so at a distance from conventional measures of success.

This kind of integrity – the attempt to live a serious life as a writer or a thinker – is something which the British have long been disinclined to admire. ‘Oh come off it!’, is the response of the Briton to continental seriousness. ‘What rot!’; ‘We don’t have to bother with any of that!’ – this kind of deflationary chirpiness can be a tonic when faced with pomposity or pretension. But it is too quick a response, I think, to continental attempts to address and remedy our situation.

This very British attitude is something which the critic and novelist Gabriel Josipovici discovers in the brand of literary realism characteristic of the contemporary novel, which ‘yields an impoverished view of life’. The work of celebrated contemporary novelists has made the world, he says, ‘smaller and meaner’. In my view, the genial self-confidence of the British novel – of ‘Establishment Literary Fiction’, in Mark Thwaite’s formulation – disconnects it from the disorienting conditions in which many of us work and live.

Does this tie in with your claims in your Manifesto about the contemporary British literary fiction?

It does. Josipovici worries that contemporary literary fiction impoverishes life. I agree with him. But I make another claim in my Manifesto: that life itself, under the conditions of neoliberalism, is becoming impoverished – and that existing forms of literary fiction have difficulties responding to and registering this impoverishment. This leads me to conclude that contemporary literary fiction risks disengagement from the literary traditions, of which literary modernism is a crucial part, due to British parochialism, but also that literary modernism itself will have to be remade in the face of contemporary conditions, due to the disastrous effects of neoliberalism. There is a further twist: the marginality of literary fiction, the fact that it is but one strand in our multi-braided culture, means that it may no longer have a role that is central enough to respond to its own crisis. That is, its marginality, which means the impossibility of taking itself seriously as literature, means that it cannot rise to its greatest challenge. Contemporary literary fiction, for me, has been displaced from the traditions that feed into it, and from the conditions of these traditions, to the extent that we can say it is premised on the death of literature. Whether we acknowledge it or not, as readers, as writers, we are posthumous with respect to literature. We’ve come too late. We can no longer believe in literature. But there is a ray of hope: once you accept this non-belief, once you affirm it in a particular way, then something may be possible.

Is this what Spurious tries to do?

I hope so. For me, Spurious marks its own distance from the conditions in which the great works of literature and philosophy of Old Europe were written. You can see this at the level of the content of the work: W. and Lars occupy the world of the present, and the world that valued the ideas they value, the world that sustained those ideas and nurtured their production, has disappeared. Much of the humour of the book comes from the fact that its characters are men out of time. But perhaps it also makes itself visible at the level of form: the way in which the novel largely eschews plot and character development - in which it ‘circles the drain’, as one critic has put it.

Isn’t this rather a gloomy view? Won’t it lead to depressing and unreadable literary fiction?

I hope not! Spurious is first of all a comic novel, a novel of black humour. Black humour, in general, has been defined in terms of its focus on the darker sides of life, on despair and death, but that does not quite capture it. Comic vision is often conservative, depending on a stable value-system, on an unshakable order of the world. A whole strain of genial British comedy is of this kind. Think of Dickens’s Mr Pickwick, or Mr Toad of Toad Hall, or of the friends who mess about in boats in Jerome L. Jerome’s novel: these characters are amiable eccentrics at whose foibles and quirks we can poke gentle fun. W. and Lars might seem to be lovable fools of this sort. But the comedy of their banter about murder, suicide, violent death and so on, their penchant for exaggeration and grotesquerie, as well as their fascination with financial and climactic apocalypse, is meant to stick in the craw. It is meant to capture a genuine sense of posthumousness that they share, and we, as readers and writers interested in literature, share with them. I try to have it both ways: the novel is supposed to be humorous, funny, in the manner of British TV comedy like Steptoe and Son, or British films like Withnail and I. It is supposed to be entertaining. But it is also supposed to be troubling, conveying the sense of the end of an older order of the world, with its accompanying values.

Spurious doesn’t have much of a plot. Was that intentional?

There isn’t. The characters are continually led to confront their failure, in a manner reminiscent of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Beckett has his characters bicker and argue to pass the time - anything "to hold the terrible silence at bay". So too with W. and Lars. The ‘terrible silence’ in question is the death of Old Europe, the death of literature. This is coupled, in the novel, with the results of neoliberalism: to financial and climactic apocalypse. The characters’ philosophical interest in messianism (in the messianism of Kafka and Rosenzweig) is an attempt to resist this silence. It is fitting, therefore, that messianism is presented in Spurious as a kind of speech – as exactly that kind of speech which takes place between W. and Lars.

Spurious is part of a trilogy ...

It is indeed. Dogma was published earlier this year, and sees the characters journeying through the southern states of the USA, as well as returning to their old haunts in Britain. Exodus, which will be published early next year, is an attempt at a final reckoning with neo-liberal Britain, and sees the characters take a final stand against the closure of W.’s philosophy department.

Interview for Lee Rourke & students at Kingston University