The world as refuge: re-reading The Space of Literature

But where has art led us? To a time before the world, before the beginning. It has cast us out of our power to begin and to end; it has turned us toward the outside where there is no intimacy, no place to rest. It has led us into the infinite migration of error. For we seek art's essence, and it lies where the nontrue admits of nothing essential.

As part of a plan drawn by nostalgia and anxiety, I have been re-reading a few chosen books, wondering how might they re-present themselves to me after years of superficial memory and neglect. I have written about one I read in May. In June I re-read Blanchot's The Space of Literature (as translated by Ann Smock).

The first few pages of the second felt like a chore blocking the discovery of new books – haven't I read this enough? – but I was soon reading each chapter as if returning home after decades of wandering. What I write now will be an attempt to understand and explain this reaction so won't be a comprehensive summary. The italics are quotations.

The first thing to say is that 'criticism' isn't the right word for The Space of Literature, and, despite the many philosophical terms, allusions and adoptions, most notably from Heidegger, 'philosophy' isn't either. What sets Blanchot apart from any definable genre is that his writing exposes itself to its own analysis, or, rather, the analysis exposes itself to writing lacking such a possessive pronoun.

The opening chapter asserts the 'solitude' of the written work: To write is to break the bond that unites the word with myself. The work is even separate from the book, which we might see as a vessel borne on the surface of a submarine current: Writing is the interminable, the incessant. This means that the space of the title is not a privileged realm for a few "great writers"; it does not have borders or features with rules to be learned but is at a remove from such power. Mallarmé felt the very disquieting symptoms caused by the sole act of writing.
 
Blanchot cites Kafka's comment that he has entered literature when he replaces 'I' with 'He', but adds that this metamorphosis is more profound: In doing this, the writer belongs to a language which no one speaks, which is addressed to no one, which has no center, and which reveals nothing. Mastery over words puts the writer in contact with a fundamental passivity that cannot be grasped: To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking. Instead, in a stirring paradox, mastery consists in the power to stop writing, to interrupt what is being written. This a curious formulation. When we admire the tone of a particular writer, he says, it is not the writer's voice we admire but the intimacy of the silence he imposes on the word. He compares this to classicism in which the calm of the regular form guarantees a language free from idiosyncrasy, where impersonal generality speaks and secures the writer a relation with truth. But such calm requires the stability of an aristocratic society in which a part of society concentrates the whole within itself by isolating itself well above what sustains it. We might say that genre fiction is an aristocratic form.

Blanchot's preface to The Space of Literature

The imposition of silence is necessary because writing is an exposure to an outside – what might have been called the divine, the sublime or the infinite, and which Blanchot refers to the other night or the other of all worlds. And it is in incantatory prose and such hyperbolic phrases, otherwise unthinkable in literary criticism, that exposes us to how strange literature is in itself. Once you become accustomed to what at first appears as anachronistic and even absurd (certainly to English eyes – I remember a friend giggling as he read the opening pages), you might also recognise such excess defines us as human: in excess of body, in excess of world, akin to the internal perspective of language that Noam Chomsky has described and the excess of consciousness Mallarmé called this drop of nothingness. And if we are drawn to poetry and to the poets Blanchot writes about, it is their strange excess that sets their work apart and deserves to be addressed without being neutralised within the stability of a regular form. This is also why The Space of Literature appeared so vital to me upon re-reading; it does not stand aside from its subject.

The risk taken by such prose is in stark contrast to scholarly method that corrals prose into pens of reason isolated from the distress of the infinite. While it resists the temptations of fascination, which is necessary for its purpose, it does not assume the guarantees it expects. As Blanchot writes in a later book:

Reason … does not begin in the light of an evidency by which it would seize itself, but rather in an obscurity that itself is not manifest and whose discovery, seizure, and affirmation alone put thought to work, causing it to find and to extend its own light.

Blanchot turns the light off to reveal such obscurity. In a disconcerting move, reaffirming the unaccountability of literary space, he rejects the familiar priority of the 'real world' over literature in which artistic activity is often portrayed as unrealistic, escapist and even in denial of the world, gaining acceptance only if it submits to the superiority of the empirical. For Blanchot, while the artist often seems a weak being who cringes within the closed sphere of his work where...he can take revenge for his failures in society, it is instead the artist who is exposed to the greatest threat: the loss of self and world in the space of literature:

It is then that Rimbaud flees into the desert from the responsibilities of the poetic decision. He buries his imagination and his glory. He says "adieu" to "the impossible" in the same way that Leonardo da Vinci does and almost in the same terms. He does not come back to the world; he takes refuge in it; and bit by bit his days, devoted henceforth to the aridity of gold, make a shelter for him of protective forgetfulness.

In later life, Rimbaud is said to have denounced his past work, refusing any further mention of it, which, for Blanchot, "shows the terror which he still felt and the force of the upheaval which he could not undergo to the limit. He is reproached with having sold out and deserted, but the reproach is easy for those who have not run the risk". The bottomless abyss belongs to art.

So much for escapism.

Re-reading The Space of Literature has reminded me why so much fiction leaves me confused by indifference and why criticism and reviewing often seems beside the point. While a novel's subject matter might be powerful and important, its story compelling, the prose style especially seductive and its sentences beautifully formed, such wealth often seems beside the point. The same goes for its social and political relevance, for a survey of its formal structures and for revelations provided by psychological analysis. They might seem very insightful and pressing, but essentially beside the point, which is itself unlocatable. But what other reasons can there be for reading a novel?

Blanchot recognises how such a question is ironed out in book culture, with the general reader who makes a livelihood in a world where the clear daytime truth is a necessity [and] believes that the work holds the moment of truth within it constantly translating the work into ordinary language, effective formulae, useful values while, on the other hand, the dilettante and the critic devote themselves to the 'beauties' of the work, to its aesthetic value. Everyone, it seems, is happy. And with the advent of the internet, these groups have become indistinguishable. Witness the routine use of the word 'experimental' to champion, mitigate or patronise anything that doesn't quite meet either process, without any question of what 'experimental' might mean.

To give an idea, Blanchot returns instead to the experience of writing before any of these ideas come into play. If the writer is devoted to the work, they are drawn by it toward the point where it undergoes impossibility. That is, when writing empties itself of the world and appears to the writer as empty, without value. It is an experience Blanchot calls the very experience of night:

In the night, everything has disappeared. This is the first night. Here absence approaches – silence, repose, night. Here ... the sleeper does not know he sleeps, and he who dies goes to meet real dying. Here language completes and fulfills itself in the silent profundity which vouches for it as its meaning.

This is not a negative however, as it is where craft and determination get the writer through the night in order to produce books. We can recognise how night maintains itself in the popularity of, for example, Horror or Gothic fantasy, in which we are exposed to the darkness in human life and to the black hole of a non-human world. Except, we all know it is only the thrill of a fairground ghost train. It is in this context that Blanchot divides night in two: When everything has disappeared in the night, 'everything has disappeared' appears. This is the other night.

We enter into the night and we rest there, sleeping and dying. But the other night does not welcome, does not open. In it one is still outside. It does not close either; it is not the great Castle, near but unapproachable, impenetrable because the door is guarded. Night is inaccessible because to have access to it is to accede to the outside, to remain outside the night and to lose forever the possibility of emerging from it.

Blanchot's essay on Beckett's trilogy is the most famous expression of this condition. Not even the best creative writing course can help. This might be why indifference stands before me and devouring novel after novel. Many might be impressively wrested from night but they are also recognisably resistant to the other; even the latest 'experimental' hit reaches for the same gifts of silent profundity. Despite this, I am still drawn to novels, many of which are not in the least avant-garde, as my enthusiasm for In a Hotel Garden demonstrates. So what is going on there; have I fallen for sentimentality? My response would be that this also shows how novels might dwell in what Blanchot calls the torn intimacy of an alliance between the activity of making a book and the passivity of writing, as the characters seek to bring to life what haunts them and yet do so only in the dissimulation of speech and stories. And not only the characters.

It is for this reason I am drawn to what is often called metafiction and invariably disparaged as writing about writing, which might still be a turning away from the world, yet only in search of an origin, for that which haunts writing. Blanchot offers a genealogy of what has passed in literature:

The work was once the language of the gods, their absence’s speech; subsequently it was the just, the balanced language of men, and then the language of men in their diversity. Then again it was the language of disinherited men, of those who do not speak. And then it was the language of what does not speak in men, of the secret, of despair or ravishment.

What, he asks, does such a list tell us? Only this: that art is constantly invisible to us. What is invisible demands to be seen, and if this suggests a demand separate from literary criticism, it is entirely in keeping with our times, in which origins are strictly taboo. What is left now for the work to say? What has always eluded its language? Blanchot asks. Seventy years after its publication, the answer and challenge proposed by The Space of Literature remains: Itself.

This business of speech: In a Hotel Garden by Gabriel Josipovici

“There is an element, in any good novel, of something that cannot be taken away without dissolving the whole book. If you remove everything else, that’s what remains. But what that core quality is, is hard to say. You can talk about it in negative terms. It’s not that the novel is so terribly exciting from a psychological point of view. It’s not that it has such unusually interesting or original insights into structures of contemporary society. It’s not that it’s so fascinating to get to know the characters, however eccentric or unique or typical. It is something else entirely, and it’s that insoluble quality that has to be there. That’s really all I can say.” – Dag Solstad

Before I had finished reading Mathias Énard’s Compass – the link goes to my review – I re-read Gabriel Josipovici’s 1993 novel In a Hotel Garden, perhaps because it has just been published in French translation and I wanted to remind myself of why I read it so often in the mid-1990s, or perhaps because I felt that, despite its many qualities, something was missing from Compass and this was the first place that occurred to me to look for its name. I assumed it wouldn’t hold up to memory and fade in estimation to match the colours on my copy's spine because many of the novels that followed – Moo Pak, Goldberg:Variations, Everything Passes, After and Infinity – are more adventurous or unusual in form and content. Could it be really as special as I remembered?

In a Hotel Garden is certainly a very quiet novel, told almost entirely in dialogue and set in everyday situations, which one reviewer compared to those in the gentle comedy of Posy Simmonds’ cartoons of English middle-class life. It begins with two friends chatting while walking a dog on Putney Heath. Ben tells Rick about his holiday in the Dolomites with his girlfriend Sandra, in particular about meeting Lily, an Englishwoman staying in the same hotel. His curiosity is piqued because she hesitates to explain her reasons for visiting northern Italy. At first she says she needed space to think about her relationship with her partner Frank back in London, who she would probably leave if she didn't love his dog so much. Ben has the chance to learn more because, as Sandra struggles to adapt to the altitude, he spends more time with Lily, chatting over coffee and then trailing in her wake on a day-long walk in the mountains. However, rather than the beginning of a traditional love triangle, the drama surrounds Lily’s reticence and Ben's persistence in trying to get her to talk.


When she finally does, she admits she wasn’t sure herself what draws her back to this part of Italy. She now realises it is because of a story her grandmother had told her about how, as a young woman on holiday in Siena with her family, she had met a young Italian man, also with his family and staying in the same hotel. They spent a great of time together in the hotel's garden. A romance appeared to be developing, even though he was already engaged and he had to leave soon for Trieste to continue his studies. They agree to meet in the same hotel the next time the family visits but, before that happens, he writes to tell her that he is marrying his fiancée. Despite this, he keeps writing letters as if nothing had happened. She never replies. Eventually he stops and his final contact is to send her a toy donkey, a gesture that upsets and offends her. Soon she gets married herself and has a family, but cannot let go of that time in the garden, repeating words to her young granddaughter:

The garden in Italy, she would say. I don’t know how I imagined it. The word garden took on a kind of magic for me. The words hotel garden. The words garden in Italy. The garden, she would say. The hotel garden.

Later, we learn that the reason the young man stopped writing was because he and his family were killed in the Holocaust. So this is a Jewish story too and Lily’s wish to find the garden becomes more complicated than the usual stuff of romance novels. Indeed, the novel's epigraph is from midrash on Genesis 39 – "Potiphar's wife too wished to belong to the history of Israel".

Back home in London, and after much deliberation, Ben contacts Lily and they meet up beside the Thames and it is here she tells him that what happened to the Jews in the past came alive for her through the young man in the garden. 

It came to me at the airport, she says. Why it was so important, that garden. It's as if that day their whole lives were present to them, their lives before and their lives after. Everything that would happen and not happen and all that would happen and not happen to their descendants. Everything. Enclosed in that garden. Held together by the trees and the wall and the silence. That's why I had to go there. To feel it for myself.

She shakes Ben's hand, says goodbye and crosses Hungerford Bridge, leaving him alone and as confused as ever. What had happened between them? Would she want to see him again? Was he only ever an inadvertent means to work through her personal issues?

The answer might not be present to Ben because it lies in the garden of the novel. When they're talking over coffee about the sights in Siena, Ben asks Lily if she had seen the mosaic in the cathedral, as it had always been covered up whenever he visited. Lily has: it depicts Absalom, third son of King David, hanging from a tree, his hair caught in low-hanging branches as he tried to escape from a battlefield. Lily says the rabbis point out that he who had gloried in the length and beauty of his hair to win popularity and undermine his father died for the same reason. Lily wonders if life can really have a pattern like that, and if we can become aware of it while in the middle of it. She decides we cannot.

To answer his questions, Ben returns to what appears to be his own pattern: talking. He talks to Lily, he talks to Rick, he talks to Francesca. This would seem harmless but, on their return from holiday, Sandra leaves Ben, without a word. Ben glories in talking about Lily and his relationship dies by it. And if we notice Ben's pattern, we begin to notice it throughout the novel: Lily talks to Ben, Ben talks to Rick, Ben talks to Francesca, and Lily's grandmother talks to the young man in the hotel garden and then talks to Lily about talking to the young man in the hotel garden. These conversations are always with someone at a certain remove: friend, granddaughter or complete stranger. Lily says her mother probably had no idea about the garden story. So what's going on here? The effect on what is said is peculiar, as Ben observes to Francesca:

– And I can’t get over this business of speech, he says.
One talks about things that could change one’s life but it’s just like talking about the weather.

In a Hotel Garden is very quiet novel because the central drama indeed appears no more pressing than the weather, and this is because we too are at a certain remove whatever the illusion of intimate access novels appear to allow. It should be no surprise then that Josipovici's novels, especially those as quiet as this, often provoke ambivalence because, while it isn't 'experimental' in any obvious way and cannot be patronised as such, neither is it a hefty tome with large characters or intense action. Indeed, it's not difficult to imagine a 500-page historical fiction following the parallel lives of Lily's grandmother and the young man, their brief intersection and their very different fates, with all the period detail you'd expect and with the holocaust narrative looming as large as a royalty cheque. And easy to imagine a keen reviewer telling us how it "tackles" themes of war, love and loss, and proves historical fiction "deserves more recognition". One might say these novels glory in life, and it's no coincidence that the novel Ben takes on holiday and fails to read is Henry James' The Ambassadors with its European setting, theme of liberation from a cramped culture and famous line "Live all you can, it's a mistake not to". If we assent to its demand, as so many do, hence its fame, why do we need its place in a novel to assure ourselves and others of its truth?

What suggests itself is that, however much we valorise living all one can, whatever we experience, distance takes possession of it. Everything that happens is already a book, even if it is one as evanescent as Lily's standing in the hotel garden. That is, what she experiences there is itself a novel. Everything is enclosed there, held together by the trees and the wall and the silence. It's why she had to go there. 

In a Hotel Garden investigates this paradoxical condition in which experience is never itself until it is what we understand as distance from experience, and therefore cannot rise above its implications. While dialogue – talking – appears to be as natural and realistic as can be, it is also as artificial and stylised as Howard Hodgkin's painting that graces the British edition. (Hodgkin once explained that he paints to recover the emotion of a place or situation and stops when that emotion returns, even if the painting is as artificial and stylised in comparison to its origin.)



I bought my copy of In a Hotel Garden on 9th February 1993. The date is written on the inside cover in red felt tip. Fifteen days later, Josipovici appeared on BBC Radio 3 to discuss the novel with John Tusa, Howard Jacobson and Kate Figes. Tusa began by asking if the title was chosen because 'hotel' and 'garden' had special meaning for Judaism: hotel standing for dispersion and exile, garden for the Garden of Eden. Josipovici was uncharacteristically fazed, so Jacobson asked if 'In' might have more meaning. He went on to say that he wrote the novel because, if he could say what he wanted to someone, he would say it to them in person and not write a novel. This adds an external displacement to those internal to the novel and substantiates the strange necessity of displacement, of writing fiction.

"Fifteen days later" was Wednesday, 24th February 1993: the day Bobby Moore died, the day the BBC broadcast a production of Beckett’s Endgame featuring Charlie Drake, and the day I drank a half a bottle of vodka in an hour, something I had not done before or since. I have no idea how I managed to record the TV and radio shows, but I did, hence the detail included here. Re-reading it again after twenty years has been a revelation, much like Lily returning many times to Italy only to discover the reason late on, and much like the author's 1977 Migrations two years ago. The revelation is I think that a book as quiet as this is necessary to enable a certain kind of speech; a speech displaced from speaking. And this is why I quoted Dag Solstad at the beginning. What's intriguing about In a Hotel Garden is that what one cannot take away without dissolving the whole book is not in fact present. Its core quality is that the core is absent, or is itself an absence that seeks to be filled with speech, and it might be this that drew me back.

Both together: Migrations by Gabriel Josipovici

The main reason I still write this blog is to maintain a contact with the need or condition that drove me to read and write in the first place; a need often misdirected in pursuit of what the industry is talking about. Long silences here report stout resistance to the temptations of disinterested reception. But what is this need? Only chance can reveal it, as a fall might graze a knee. So one night at 10pm I happened to be looking for the availability of another book when I noticed a bookseller had priced Gabriel Josipovici's 1977 novel Migrations at £90. My copy is in better condition, I thought, and picked it off the shelf for an inspection.

Beneath the epigram in Hebrew I had written a translation: Arise and go, for this is not your rest (Micah 2:10). Fortunately, it was in pencil and I scrubbed out the words. But why? I have no intention of selling and the copy stands for sentimental memories of my first reading as a student in January 1992: the anonymous protagonist pacing his bedroom, vomiting into a basin, drinking directly from the tap, walking about town under a burning sun, looking into shop windows at bundles of shoes tied together, slumped beneath a lamppost or over a café table with a nearby stranger offering him a cup of tea: Ere, the man says. Av some of mine.

The scenes never stop to clarify a traditional back story, nor even to insert narrative conjunctions, so that the café scene in one paragraph moves straight into another in which the man is pacing to and fro in his bedroom. A scene from adulthood moves then without pause to a scene from childhood, yet not as in stream of consciousness but something less secure, less comforting, not contained within a mind but as if the meaning of each lived moment is sought in repetition and in order to resist the constant migration of mind and self. The apparent distress of the protagonist in this quest is described with a mixture of clinical distance and romantic metaphor and simile.

The bulb hangs down in the middle of the room. It is lit, making the curtainless window appear like a black mirror in which only the blub itself is reflected. But the light is poor and seems to have difficulty reaching the walls of the big room. Even the washbasin and the bed are in shadow.

Silence flows away from him in dark rivers.

Falling backwards, in a wide arc, he stretches out his hand to grip the lamppost and encounters only air. The black sky presses on his face like a blanket.

Everything flows away from him. It flows outwards and away in dark rivers.

The rhythms of repetitions and returns build an uncommon presence, as if the words have been typed directly onto the page, indenting the paper with the urgency and confusion of a writer trying to catch up with the world and himself. So, soon after 10pm, I had started reading Migrations and before midnight I had read 50 pages. And this is why I read: the gifts of chance rediscovery, of being returned to real needs, which is also why I remember Thomas Bernhard, aged 19 and on the edge of death, reading Dostoevsky's The Demons: "Never in my whole life had I read such an engrossing and elemental work ... it had shown me a path that I could follow and told me that I was on the right one, the one that led out".

The elemental in literature is often misconstrued from outré subject matter or writing described as raw and unmediated, yet in Migrations the elemental appears as the subjection of form and content to the logic of its title: constant becoming in constant undoing; constant undoing in constant becoming; the logic of birth and death. So the man is unnamed not in order to protect identity but to loosen the binds of identity, to allow time to colonise the means by which the identified resists time and self erasure. The man senses constant movement in everything around him – when he orders a beer it tastes of urine: "of everything that has been ejected".

The paradox here is that the attempt to inhabit migration in a narrative automatically includes the quest for unity and permanence; a novel is a monument to unity and permanence. Literature takes possession of the elemental, becomes a still point in the hub of its vicious circle and thereby becomes a means to express, analyse and perhaps to lead out of terror and comfort without denying either. The man explains to someone what is like in this space:

–First of all, he says, there is this stifling. This effort to draw breath. As if time had become a blanket someone was stuffing into your mouth and the more you opened your mouth the more blanket was stuffed in and the less chance there was to breathe.
–Go on, she says.
–I–he says. I don't–
She watches him. She smiles. – Go on, she says.
He looks down at his hands.
 –Well? she says.
 –Lazarus, he says.
 –Lazarus?

To be alive is to sense the winding sheets of burial as they take hold and then as they unwind to leave not fresh air to breathe but a pile of dust. Lazarus, he says, embodies despair and desperation, and he, the man without name, embodies the madness of the paradox thrashing beneath the surface of the paper:

What man wants, he says, is to speak in the way as he eats. He wants to cry out, to talk, and then for his words to fill himself and the person he is addressing as substantially as a great big chunk of animal meat. That's what we all want. Not the one, not the other. Both together.

Migrations was Josipovici's fourth novel, with Hotel Andromeda last year being his eighteenth, but very little else compares with its extreme expression of the major themes of his work. At 230 pages it is also by far his longest novel, and yet it is perhaps closest to Everything Passes of 2006, which at 60 pages is by far his shortest. A few years after it was published, Josipovici wrote a short afterword to a collection of his reviews in which he describes the reception of this and two later novels:

It is a shock to any artist who has only thought of getting things 'right', of pinning down that elusive feeling which is the source and end of all creative activity, to wake up one morning and find himself labelled 'experimental'. Yet this is what happened to me.

The Times and the Daily Telegraph, he says, used the term to patronise or damn with faint praise what didn't fit into the familiar round of English novels. Worse, the London Review of Books referred to him as "prominent among those who are anxious to free the novel from any hampering subservience to the outer world" and having "a lingering but still severe case of the Robbe-Grillet syndrome", the first part of which makes no sense with Migrations, steeped as it is in the physical reality of London's streets, unless one assumes the novel should be a branch of reportage. The furore after the publication in 2010 of What Ever Happened to Modernism? and lack of reviews, let alone major awards, for a novel as great as Infinity in 2012 suggests things have not improved. But if, like me, you wish to maintain a contact with the condition that drives you to read in the first place, there is a way to arise and go from such travesties. Watch out for your knee.