Lars Iyer's Blog, page 93

History can  only be interpeted if one admits that man has been marked by evil since the beginning. He is condemned, he's cursed. The profoundest book that was ever written is the first book of the Old Testament, Genesis. Everything is said there. The whole vision of human destiny, of man. The very fact that God is afraid of man, that's what is so fantastic.

There's an amazing story in the Koran: when man made his appearance on earth a fish came up aout of the water and a vulture came down from the sky, and they said, 'The danger has come', the catastrophe. And the fish dived down to the bottom of the waters and the vulture flew away into the sky.

Man is accursed. History is at once demonaic and tragic, the whole history of the world.

[Ionescu] is a profoundly unhappy man, and success has only aggravated his misery. Which is what I like about him. Instead of coming to terms with life, he has never despaired as much as since he's been famous. For years we spoke on the phone almost daily. One can die of laughter with him, even when he's in despair. He's a man who is haunted by the idea of death, much more than I. With age, for me, this obsession has grown weaker. With him, it's the contrary. It's not that he's afraid to die. He has a sense of the ephemeral, of things not lasting, and his work is an expression of it. One might even say that is humour is somewhat the disconsolation of dying.

[...] I developed an interetst not so much in religion itself as in mystics. Not because of their religious faith but for their excess, their passion, their inner violence. So I began to read the great mystics, and I soon understood that I could not have faith. But it interested me because the mystics lived a more intense life than others. And too, becfuase of their kind of extraordinary pride, me and God, God and me.

Each one of us obviously knows extreme states of solitude, where nothing exists anymore, especially at night when one is absolutely alone and there is always the difficulty of speaking with oneself. So, I've defined God as the partner in moments of extreme solitude. One thinks of God when one can think of nothing else anymore, of no other person. It has nothing to do with faith in my case, it's solely a pretext for dialgoue. It's a monologue, but because everything else has vanished, one clashes with God, the last companion in solitude.

The existence of God doesn't even interest me.

Yes, why do [the mystics] write, since they're writing for God. God doesn't read.

I should have been a sage, but I couldn't. I wanted to be one, but I couldn't manage it, so I wrote books. Everything I've done has been the result of a spiritual failure. But for me, that's not necessarily a negative concept.

It's when I finished studying it, at the point where I stopped believing in philosophy, that I began to read Nietzsche. Well, I realised that he wasn't a philosopher, but was more: a temperament. So, I read him, but never systematically, now and then. But I really don't read him anymore. I consider his letters his most authentic work, because in them he's truthful, while in his other work he's prisoner to his vision. In his letters one sees that he's just a poor fellow, that he's ill, exactly the opposite of everything he claimed. [...] His work is an unspeakable megalomania. When one reads the letters he wrote at the same time, one sees that he's lamentable, it's very touching, like a character out of Chekhov.

It was, if you like, the disappointment of philosophy that made me turn to literature. To tell the truth, it's from that point on that I realised that Dostoevsky was much more important that a great philosopher, And that great poetry was something extraordinary.

[Severe insomnia] was the profound cause of my break with philosophy. I realised that in moments of great despair philosophy is no help at all, and offers absolutely no answers. So I turned to poetry and literature, where I found no answers either, but states of mind analogous to my own. I can say that my sleepless nights brought about the break with my idolatry of philosophy.

Normally, someone who goes to bed and sleeps all night begins the next day almost a new life. It's not simply another day, it's another life. And so he can undertake things, can manifest himself, he has a present, a future, and so on. But for someone who doesn't sleep, the time from going to bed at night to rising in the morning is all continuous, with no interruption, no suppression of consciousness. So, instead of starting a new life at eight in the morning, you're still as you were at eight the evening before. The nightmare contintues uninterrupted and, in the morning, start what, since there's no difference since the night before? That new life doesn't exist. The whole day is a trial, it's the continuation of the trial.

In my opinion, almost all suicides, about ninety per cent, say, are due to insomnia. I can't prove that, but I'm convinced.

I quarreled with everyone. I couldn't put up with anything. And I found everyone idiotic. Nobody understood what I understood. It was the feeling of not belonging. Then too, this feeling that everything is a comedy and makes no sense. The future was meaningless for me, the present as well. And so, philosophically, because one is always a philosopher, it's a sort of exasperation, an intensification, of the state of being conscious. Not self-conscious, conscious. The state of consciousness is the great misfortune, and in my case, the permanent misfortune. Normally, it's the contrary, it's consciousness which is man's advantage. Me, I arrived at the conclusion that no, the fact of being conscious, of not being oblivious, is the great catastrophe.

The drama of insomnia is that time doesn't pass. You're lying down in the middle of the night and you are no longer in time. You're not in eternity either. Time passes so slowly that it becomes agonising. All of us, being alive, are drawn along by time because we are in time. When you lie awake like that, you are outside of time. So, time passes outside of you, you can't catch up with it.

[...] consciousness of time proves that you are outside of time, that you've been ejected. One could really call it a philosophical or metaphysical experience.

Everything I've written, I wrote to escape a sense of oppression, of suffocation. It wasn't from inspiration, as they say. It was a sort of getting free, to be able to breathe.

[...] a writer needn't know things in depth. If he speaks of something, he shouldn't know everything about it, only the things that go with his temperament. He should not be objective. One can discuss a subject in depth, but in a certain direction, not trying to cover the whole thing. For a writer the university is death.

Q. Do you have particular writing habits or conditions when you can work? A. I've never been able to write in a normal state. [...] I always had to be either depressed or angry, furious or disgusted, but never in a normal state. And I write preferably in a state of semidepression. There has to be something that's not right.

Suicide gives me the idea that I can leave this world when I want to, and that makes life bearable, instead of destroying it.

I considered life as a mere postponing of suicide. I had thought I wasn't going to live past the age of thirty. But it wasn't from cowardice that I was always postponing my suicide. I exploited this idea, I was its parasite. At the same time, this appetite for existing was also very strong in me.

... I read also in order not to think, to escape, to not be me.

Q. You've often expressed in your books your interest in biographies. A. Above all I like to see how people end. When you read about someone's life, you see what illusions he started out with, and it's very interesting to see how they fail him.

E.M. Cioran, interviewed

It is never early enough for W. (who believes things started going downhill in the mid-Neolithic); but neither is it ever late enough. Just as the end keeps on ending endlessly, the novel itself keeps on beginning inexorably. In the paradoxical incipit of Grammars of Creation, George Steiner declares that "We have no more beginnings": here, we have nothing but beginnings, but it comes to the same thing really.

from another interesting review: Andrew Gallix on Dogma for Bookslut.

Another interesting review: Andrew Gallix on Dogma for Bookslut.

Spurious nominated for The Believer Book Award.

Iyer implies that a better or "older" world, where literature could still exist, would be one where his own writing couldn't. The presumption here is that Spurious and its sequel are "signs of the times," and thus that books can still sum up the epoch in which they're written: surely a "literary" aim, if ever there was one. Perhaps Iyer's is a literary project par excellence. Presenting his novels as symptoms or symbols, he slightly uncritically slips into sync with one of W.'s dictums in Dogma: "always write as though your ideas were world-historical."

from the great David Winters' review of Dogma for The Rumpus.

The great David Winters reviews Dogma for The Rumpus.

Jacob Silverman reviews Dogma at the Quarterly Conversation.

The irony is that the reality of W.'s and Lars' despair is palliated as it is affirmed and actualised. Writing alone opens a space in which a cure becomes possible, but only if despair is acknowledged. Dogma saturates despair with despair with disingenuous charm; a sly disavowal of despair.

The great Steve Mitchelmore reviews Dogma. 

The great Steve Mitchelmore reviews Dogma.