No help at all

Painting is practical day-to-day thing I think. One might say something clever, one might say something big, but one does something limited. It’s a serious thing – like religion – like love – one does the persistent thing, and then the really remarkable happens when something’s there that wasn’t there before.

Frank Auerbach's words from fifty years ago were pasted above my student work desk without ever prompting attention. Inspirational quotes are there to be ignored, after all. Only lately has the contrast between his trust in a modest routine and apparent wonder in the presence of art demanded examination. After so much striving, after so much art, what is this something there?

The answer is obvious: a rectangle with colours. Except not all paintings are 'really remarkable', as confirmed by Auerbach's fame for regularly scraping the paint from the canvas to start again and his recent description of "laying siege to the subject" in order to "work through [draughtmanship] to something deeper". How this depth works through practical components is unclear, but it would at least mean the value unique to a painting is never reducible to physical matter despite only ever being physical matter. We all know this already without worrying for too long about its implications, especially as it is safer to chatter about content than to ask, again, what is this something there?

How indeed can we talk beyond content, especially lately when content has become everything? Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle novel sequence and Mark Kozelek's recent LPs are prime examples of a zeitgeist in which oddly mundane content takes precedence, salinising poetic abstractions. Not, that is, fictionalised autobiography or misery memoir in which every description, anecdote and incident is a necessary part of a whole and leads somewhere in more or less artful fashion, but a focus on the apparently random and indeterminate.

Since at least the presumption of David Shields' Reality Hunger that the primary motivation for artists is to get closer to reality, the remove of art has been placed under quarantine, suspected of infecting readers with unhealthy deceit and indulgent fantasy, and in response these artists appear to be in the vanguard of an extreme supersession to the everyday.

(This is where one is supposed to cite examples – he writes about changing a nappy! he sings about building a house! – but this would make both sound like stunts, literary or musical readymades. So let a song sing for itself.)



Kozelek explains his new mode of songwriting as part of a wish to let go ("I wanted to give my first instincts a chance without shooting them down immediately"), while Knausgaard famously dispensed with attempts to write a novel and just wrote about his life, thousands of words a day for three years. Both appear to be shortcuts to "something there", and certainly their improvised and headlong nature never allow content and form to resolve, thereby disconcerting critical expectations of transcendent mastery.

Why is this happening? In Kozelek's case, it might easily alienate his core audience, used to swooning to the chiming sentiments of Carry Me Ohio, and Knausgaard's critical and sales success has come at the price of abasing himself before the world, so cynical career moves they are not.

Perhaps they have turned toward the quotidian because they recognise a subtler malady, so while the zeitgeist appears as only the latest cure for a virus whose quack remedies have included a 21st century Charles Dickens and HBO serials written by Shakespeare, the most notable symptom is revealed here as the ache of what escapes content, the earworm nagging at us all, that which infects even as the lock snaps shut on the quarantine cell. If this movement is toward anything then, it is toward the remove of the everyday; a conclusion that helps no one and prompts only the same question and demands the same response: not an ontology of art to be erected inside a critical, philosophical or theological apparatus, because this would be content too, but instead writing, and writing alone. A serious thing.

Ten years in this space

This week marks ten years since this blog was born. Appropriately, the first post was about beginnings. As I tell Mark Thwaite in this interview about literary blogging, it wasn't the first blog I'd written for, but this was the first solo effort:

Almost immediately I recognised This Space as my true home, a miraculous release into a limitless expanse in which writing could be explored in the direction demanded by the work under discussion. The editorial identity was soon established and gave me what I had lacked until then. My only responsibility was to sustain that exploration.

Perhaps ten years suggests a certain relentlessness, an unwillingness to develop going forward. To which I respond: "Blogging is a singular project because it goes nowhere and can only keep going in that direction".

The lawn of genre: Wittgenstein Jr by Lars Iyer

In the relaxed confines of the LRB Bookshop on a warm August evening, Lars Iyer marked the publication of his fourth novel by telling an audience that as a youngster he had been drawn to philosophy rather than fiction as a means to find a way to live, to think his way to life. It's an old question – how to live? – and one often so pressing that philosophers have made it central to their lives. This indeed used to be the definition of a philosopher: someone who lived consistently with their beliefs. Ludwig Wittgenstein is one example. For his character Wittgenstein Jr, Iyer says philosophy is also "a kind of spiritual progress", with Socrates and Augustine as his own key figures. So why did Iyer himself turn from philosophy to writing fiction?

How to live? is a simple question too of course, as light as a falling leaf and easily brushed aside as you join a queue to have your copy signed. Without noticing, you're soon dealing with ephemeral demands and the question is answered for you. Iyer said that by the time he was established as an academic in the subject, teaching and supervising, researching and presenting papers at conferences, publishing books, philosophy itself had been displaced. The pressure of having to justify every turn in an argument with references and footnotes covering all contributions and all angles meant the youthful quest was replaced by bureaucracy and career concerns in which "spiritual progress" equalled redundancy. How then to ask the question again?

Fiction marks his answer, a form defined by a lack of pressure, by freedom, so we shouldn't be surprised that the drama of each novel he has written persists in the distressing absence of a philosophy by which to live; a certain weight. In the Spurious trilogy, it is found in the double-act despair of W. and Lars as they float like schlubby cherubim in search of God's anchor while, in Wittgenstein Jr, the drama emerges from the asymmetry of a troubled Cambridge philosophy tutor and his lightweight, hedonistic students. The philosopher perplexes, irritates and fascinates them in equal measure with his silences and gnomic remarks. I will teach you differences. Philosophy stands between us and salvation. They decide he has modelled himself on the real Ludwig Wittgenstein, and so the fun begins. "When will he present an actual argument? – Mulberry's taking bets."

After a while the stand-in Wittgenstein becomes more talkative. He implores his students to dispense with Cambridge cleverness and Cambridge pride in order to face the challenge of his philosophical lesson. The anxious silences are due to paranoia. He believes the Cambridge dons are out to destroy him, as he seeks a utopia of "after philosophy" in which "the light on a particular afternoon will be as rich as the collected works of Kant". Cambridge University stands for what obscures such light, it stands for the hegemony of English philistinism, English parochialism, for a landscape flattened by the English steamroller.

All of England was once a lawn, Wittgenstein says. The whole of the country, with its uplands and lowlands, with its suburbs and towns, was once the quintessence of lawn. [...]

And it was in the name of the English lawn that the enemy within was kept down, Wittgenstein says. The Peasants' Revolt was crushed for seeking equality on the English lawn. The Diggers were transported for declaring that the English lawn was part of the commons. [...]

But never was the English lawn so lush as in the great universities of England! Wittgenstein says. Old expanses of lawn, strewn with meadowsweet and buttercups in high summer. Crocuses blooming in spring.

The numbers soon dwindle to the handful of students whose comments and exchanges narrate the novel, including the aristocratic Ede, convinced of his own destiny, the sore-thumb Benwell, a working-class boy from up north, the Kirwin twins lost without a war in which to die a futile death and who instead throw themselves into vigorous sports, Mulberry in his obscene T-shirts and the self-effacing Peters, the shy Yorkshire boy with a crush on his tutor and who records what everyone says. His cartoon of campus life is one of the joys of Iyer's new-found freedom. Wittgenstein Jr takes a walk on the lawn:

Posh students everywhere. Rah boys in gilets and flip-flops, with piles of bed-head hair. Rugby types, as big as fridges, all red-cheeked health, their voices booming. Rah girls dressed in gym gear and pony-tails. English roses in horse-and-hound clothing, as though fresh from the gymkhana. Yummy-not-yet-mummies in fur-lined Barbour. Ethno-sloanes, with string tops and slouch bags. Sloane-ingénues with big cups of coffee, sweater sleeves half pulled over their hands.

But why is it so pleasurable? At first this sounds like the classic and contemptible English light comedy in which characters are ridiculed for the Schadenfreude of harassed commuters, generic personas dancing on the end of the author's strings before a garishly painted state-of-the-nation backcloth. Perhaps because such hyperbole is counterbalanced by Wittgenstein Jr's apocalyptic vision of philosophical rapture. Combined and in opposition they have a peculiar effect on the reader, both ecstatic and deflating, so that even as one savours the possibility of another life, another world, there is also the absurd present. While Iyer convinces us of Wittgenstein Jr's spiritual yearning and captures the aura of his namesake with minimal brush strokes, the madcap students remind us it is of course only a novel and that the characters are inventions, that the stifling conformity of Cambridge is an exaggeration and that Wittgenstein Jr is not Ludwig Wittgenstein. Everything is weightless. But this is also necessary, because lightness enables flight. When Tibor Fischer judged the book "too long" he might have added that such airborne hyperbole is always too long and even one excessive, declaratory fictional sentence might already be too much, popping up like a molehill on the lawn over which the donnish greenkeeper might then stand, tutting.

Wittgenstein Jr comes to an end as the carefree life of a student comes to an end. Salvation of a sort is offered to Wittgenstein Jr, but he disappears. A clue to his whereabouts was seen earlier when students go to his room to check on his well-being and spy scraps of paper tacked to the wall with only one word visible: APERION, Anaximander's word for the eternal or cosmological infinity (also spelled "apeiron" but this is how it appears in the novel). Perhaps this is an additional mark of excess to the one Derrida says signifies the participation in a genre without membership, a mark that is itself not part of the genre yet necessary for its distinction and recognition. Aperion then is the mark of a universal principle of existence, an abstraction outside of life that nevertheless makes life possible and is apparently sensible only in the light of a particular afternoon and in the freedom, lightness and excess of writing, and yet which, as Fischer's cavil confirms, must also succumb to the ever-encroaching English lawn.

Back in the LRB Bookshop, the event drawing to a close, the audience was given a chance to ask questions. As hands went up and a microphone passed around, I wondered what it would mean for the lightness of fiction to become as heavy as academic philosophy, with its own bureaucracy and career demands, for it to be a kind of spiritual regression, for aperion to be only a word tacked to a wall, and then how a writer might evade the lawn of genre. But I didn't ask the question. Perhaps Wittgenstein Jr's disappearance is the answer.

A silhouette of itself: Taipei by Tao Lin

Some novels offer the perfect opportunity for reviewers to palliate otherwise desolate and sundered lives. Notable examples in recent years include Vila-Matas' Montano's Malady, Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones and Tao Lin's first novel Eeeee Eee Eeee. There are many others but Tao Lin's Taipei, published last year, is an extreme case. One reviewer found relief in the "vapid stupidity" of its prose, another in its "massive discharge of waste matter", a third in its "mindless kitsch". As we watch them scurry in haste to the well-furnished bunkers of polite literary society, we can infer each reviewer found clarity and meaning in the apophatic trial of the real thing, leaving only smeared pages of abandoned review copies fluttering on the waste land above.

Meanwhile, those still exposed to the breeze might be better able to recognise the gifts of subjecting experience to writing, or perhaps that should be subjecting writing to experience. The two are often difficult to tell apart, which might be why such hacking is routinely accepted as the task of critics: everything must be kept clear and fiction must remain a desirable product for consumers. But just as the words Taipei and Tao Lin run into each on the outer cover of this novel, so the artist's struggle to articulate a relation to the world disappears into the work of writing so that neither can maintain a discrete identity.

The meeting of life and art is a familiar theme in fiction of course, and while some are content play with biographical fact and bibliographical fiction in order to run amusing rings around an audience, for example Adam Thirwell characterises Philip Roth's fiction as "daring the reader to confuse [fictional] doubles for the original" by "making the life and the art seem like disguises for each other", Tao Lin approaches it more anxiously and without the distance of mastery. The novel is narrated in traditional third-person omniscience reporting the thoughts and actions of Paul, a 26-year-old New York writer with a family in Asia, with specific attention on his relationships with soon-to-be departed girlfriend Michelle and new girlfriend, soon-to-be wife Erin. They go to literary events, visit his parents in Taipei, "ingest" prescription painkillers and Ecstacy, mention how "depleted" they feel, watch movies on their MacBooks, make movies on their MacBooks, but nothing ever generates an event to disrupt the core of their existence or the narration of their existence. If there is nothing especially radical here in literary terms, it does generate a mix of blankness and disquiet in the reader. The repetition of "ingest" and "depleted" throughout blows air between word and experience to the point where neither has any weight, so we read them without gaining what reviewers persuade us to expect in terms of narrative development. Disquiet then is the impossibility of anything happy emerging in our otherwise pleasurable habit of reading. We are not moving forward. So while Taipei evokes the apparent insignificance of our modern lives, what might be dismissed as literary posturing and provocation is instead realism become tragically unreal.

Critics are also suspicious of the social media references as indicative of a cynical contemporaneity, spurred on by the author's persona presented in the same social media. It is true that Paul and his friends are embedded in contemporary American culture to an alarming degree – there is only one novel mentioned to compare to the learned references to philosophy and literature in Montano's Malady and The Kindly Ones – and yet, as a result, the friends float free of any contact, like despairing ghosts in the machine. Their culture is a given, a plateau of distraction and superficial interaction – fast food restaurants, chain stores, electronic goods, movies on Netflix – but, like a plateau, lacking any decline or elevation. Seeking relief, Paul notes that he has just sent his longest email via iPhone and then listens to his favourite music track on high volume and repeat, concentrating on the drums or the bass "so that he becomes memoryless". The reason why it is his favourite is as inconsequential as the iPhone email record and the track appears to be his favourite only because it comes closest to enabling the condition whereby he loses the self compelled to make such distinctions. While for Estragon and Vladimir everything is promised in the form of Godot, in Taipei, there is only the promise of nothing. All of which leaves the status of this novel in question. What kind of relief does yet another novel about relationship issues and existential gloom offer?

Recently I suggested the reason why the works of Marcel Proust and Karl Ove Knausgaard maintain a fascination with readers is not due to the extreme length of their books or similarities in subject matter but instead the ambiguity of their genre: both are presented as novels yet are so closely aligned to the reality of the authors' own lives that we read them more aware of everyday mystery and chance than in a traditional memoir, and far more so than in 'gritty' realism. While the coy name change moves Taipei closer to Roth/Zuckerman territory than to the same-name first person of Proust and Knausgaard, this is a necessary function of the condition of interchangeable signs without meaning from which the novel emerges: Paul is barely himself, and it is no joke. So while Taipei might not gain the aura of Proust and Knausgaard, it shares their struggle.

Going beyond the insouciance overt in his earlier novels, Taipei both enacts a fundamental alienation and seeks a cure within its means. While considering the state of their relationship:

Paul thought that he would stop thinking about himself and focus on Erin, but instead, almost reflexively, as a method of therapy, began thinking about suicide, then became aware of himself, a few minutes later, earnestly considering—or maybe only imagining—trying to convince Erin that they should commit suicide together. [...]
Paul began to feel, in a way he hadn’t before, like he comprehended double suicide—the free and mysterious activity of it, like a roller coaster descending only into darkness, but accessible from anywhere, on the theme park of Earth, always open.

Comprehension is only a moment, only 'like' and never itself, and occurs so rarely that it flares like fireworks of dark matter, promising, much like writing, much like reading, the presence of mass where mass cannot be seen. The novel resolves without resolution as darkness is pondered again by Paul, in bed with Erin sleeping beside him, thinking of the "glistening, black, mound-shaped mass" of a monkfish she ate in a restaurant and whose picture he then looked up on Wikipedia to show her. He feels emotional contemplating "the light-absorbing mass of it, a silhouette of itself", just as we might contemplating this novel. It helps to palliate otherwise desolate and sundered lives.

Critical Perspectives on Gabriel Josipovici

Revue LISA, a print journal published by the University of Rennes, has a very welcome edition dedicated to the work of Gabriel Josipovici. It is also online.

Readers new to his fiction and criticism would do well to read Vesna Main's Beyond the "Grammar", in which the grammar is "the formulaic apparatus of most novels", and Victoria Best's very moving essay on The Cost of Creativity in his work.

The editor Marcin Stawiarski is also organising Zig Zag, Twist and Turn, a conference on Josipovici's work, to be held at Dalarna University in Sweden this September. Stawiarski has also conducted an interview for the edition containing answers that might surprise those who associate Josipovici with Modernist convolutions:

MS: You say that to be able to write you need two things: on the one hand, the feeling that something must be said; on the other, the feeling that it’s impossible to say it. So that that very impossibility becomes the subject of your work. Is it a form of a writer’s block? Or is there more to it than that?

GJ: No, it’s very simple. Most of the important feelings we have are too deep and complex for words — the feeling of loss, for example, or elation. Or ordinary little things like the effect of sunlight on a brick wall as one walks by. If one is struck by something like that — a big thing like the loss of a loved person, a small thing like sunlight on a brick wall — one wants to find a way of expressing that. It’s not easy. But it’s the only thing that interests me.

France and Sweden seem to be far ahead in recognising the value of one of England's finest writers. Oh, and his new novel Hotel Andromeda is published this week by Carcanet.

A glacier of flights: Dictionary of Untranslatables

Going back to a beloved novel after many years can be a disconcerting experience. Often you wonder what you saw the first time around to prompt such nostalgia and loving reverence. Much of the detail is unfamiliar, alien even. Unlike a poem, whose aura is embedded in words recited both subconsciously and at will, a novel is recovered en bloc, masking many details and existing almost like a Platonic form we contemplate with awe in its absence. But, when trodden again, the perfect lawn has molehills.

In effect, our personal library is a collection of portals to disillusion protected by rows and rows of upright spines. Could this be why packed shelves ferment a curious mixture of peace and anxiety?

Vienna

My first example is a novel I read one summer in Victoria Park, a small green area behind Portsmouth's main shopping area, and after which reading other novels was never quite the same. In Thomas Bernhard's Concrete an old man in Vienna chooses to leave his estate to a name picked at random from the London telephone directory. His finger alights on one name: Sarah Slother of 128 Knightsbridge – which just seems unlikely given that Knightsbridge is an exclusive road and not especially residential, comparable to a British author choosing Sabine Sänger of Unter den Linden 128. It lacks the randomness it is supposed to represent. Not necessarily a flaw of course and possibly there to maintain Bernhard's mode of disruption – random is never random – except for me it softens the whitewashed wall of prose I had walked into that day. To mitigate such disappointments, we often turn to other superficial features: the objective content of a novel (“X is the Dickens of the Credit Crunch”), the social value of an oppressed group stepping onto the literary stage ("Y is an important new voice"), the cod liver oil of experimental prose ("Zzzzz"). But do we actually recognise these qualities in the first, silent reading?

Jesenice

Perhaps this is why I have read my second example, Peter Handke’s Repetition, at least six times in the 26 years since Die Weiderholung was translated, as I sought to renew the peculiar transformation it imposed back in 1988. While Handke's book, like Proust's, bathed the earth in sunlight, I have always struggled to translate that experience into words. Having written this, I now see WG Sebald used light to characterise the effect of reading this novel:

[Repetition] allows the peculiar light which illuminates the space under a leafy canopy or a tent canvas to glisten between words, placed here with astounding caution and precision; in doing so, he succeeds in making the text into a sort of refuge amid the arid lands which, even in the culture industry, grow larger day by day.
[Translated by Nathaniel Davis]

So it is there. Yet superficially the narration is your familiar first person Bildungsroman telling of Filip Kobal’s family and school life in southern Austria in early 1960s, and then of his journey over the border into Slovenia in search of his long-lost elder brother. Certainly there’s something romantic and adventurous about Kobal’s discovery of the towns and countryside of the old Yugoslavia, but nothing you couldn't find in many other novels, and re-reading Repetition has emphasised these similarities. The difference is that the discoveries are presented not as lyrical flights tacked onto the narrative for local colour but as catalysts for Filip’s ability to make the journey, to find something other than his brother and then tell his ability to tell the story (that is, to repeat it). A bricked-in ‘blind’ window seen on the wall of a stationmaster’s house reminds him how forty years before his brother had been rushed to a doctor late at night to save the sight in one eye, which was lost anyway.

The significance of the blind window remained undefined, but suddenly that window became a sign, and in that same moment I decided to turn back. My turning back—and here again the sign was at work—was not definitive; it applied only to the hours until the following morning, when I would really start out, really begin my journey, with successive blind windows as my objects of research, my traveling companions, my signposts. And when later, on the evening of the following day, at the station restaurant in Jesenice, I thought about the shimmering of the blind window, it still imparted a clear message—to me it meant: “Friend, you have time.”
[Translated by Ralph Manheim]

So it might be that Repetition stood out as a refuge in arid lands because it enabled me to recognise signs in my own youthful journey, whereas later they were overlooked as habit replaced wonder. This is another aspect in common with Proust. A third is in how the opening sentence situates the entire narrative to come:

A quarter of a century, or a day, has passed since I arrived in Jesenice on the trail of my missing brother.

That is, the signs guiding Filip's journey require chance and patient attention to show themselves. Whether a day or twenty-five years later is irrelevant, they are present if one can find the means of access. On the other hand, dilettantish demands might invite awareness only of generic features and the awkwardness of specific detail.

Venice

While the aura of a novel you've read might be threatened by re-reading, so too can reading one you’ve never read before. Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice is famously about an ageing writer’s infatuation with a 13-year-old boy. To the modern reader it is an uncomfortable scenario, especially as Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful author and married man with a family, has much in common with his creator. For years I never thought to read it, assuming, I suppose, that I knew it already. However, reading it this year was a surprise because the peculiar risk Mann took emerges not so much as creepy self-projection but as a necessary component of the subject. Erich Heller summarises it as "the war between form and chaos, serenity of mind and consuming passion ... with Death presiding over it as judge and ultimate conqueror." For a novelist to approach this war in this way is to court a different kind of suspicion – especially from modern readers more attuned to bullshit than mystic epiphany – but Aschenbach’s dodgy behaviour is the necessary inverse of the essayistic discussion of his life and work in which it is framed, and which is much less famous.

If the aura of a novel is at odds with its detail and what we value is irreconcilable with whatever we are able to say about it, then the act of writing itself must too be part of this dynamic impasse, leaving the author as eager to have access to the gift of the work as much as the reader. Death in Venice is what happens when this impasse becomes the theme. Beneath the dignified, high-bourgeois façade, something lurks in Aschenbach, something great or dark, something like transcendence or death, something like what John Marcher called The Beast in the Jungle, and its imminence and hesitation before birth gives pulse to his story. Soon after we meet him, Aschenbach is finally paying the price for devoting his life to the dignity and serenity of form:

At forty, at fifty, he was still living as he had commenced to live in the years when others are prone to waste and revel, dream high thoughts and postpone fulfillment. He began his day with a cold shower over chest and back; then, setting a pair of tall wax candles in silver holders at the head of his manuscript, he sacrificed to art, in two or three hours of almost religious fervour, the powers he had assembled in sleep. Outsiders might be pardoned for believing that his [two famous novels] were a manifestation of great power working under high pressure, that they came forth, as it were, all in one breath. It was the more triumph for his morale; for the truth was that they were heaped up to greatness in layer after layer, in long days of work, out of hundreds and hundreds of single inspirations; they owed their excellence, both of mass and detail, to one thing and one alone; that their creator could hold out for years under the strain of the same piece of work, with an endurance and a tenacity of purpose like that which had conquered his native province of Silesia, devoting to actual composition none but his best and freshest hours.
[Translated by Martin C. Doege]

What this reveals then is that the aura is not present in the detail but that detail is the only means of access. Colm Tóibín confirms this in audio interview when he rejects the idea that in writing The Master, his novel about the author of The Beast in the Jungle, he was inhabiting the consciousness of an historical individual:

I wrote the first chapter .... and then left it for about 18 months. What happens then ... is that your dreamtime – you're lying in bed in the morning, you're walking along the street – that you start to think more and more deeply into that consciousness you've developed. But it's a question then of cunning and style, of just trying to add detail after detail after detail that seems to you to be true to what the next thing was that happened. And you're inventing, you're inventing, you're inventing, and you're adding. But the main thing is that the sentence structure and the sound of the words equals a tone that you've established from the very beginning, almost in the first sentence. And that adds up strangely to something, or doesn't. But you can't really judge that. You can't really suddenly say: "Oh this is the historical [Henry] James I'm doing". No, this is the next sentence I'm doing. You can only really think in detail.

Later he says that James called himself "a worker, a constant producer", so in that sense was very much like von Aschenbach, except that he never quite suffered the same fate, though perhaps came close when he became infatuated with the much younger Hendrik Andersen. The Master describes an allusive shared visit to the grave of Constance Fenimore Woolson in another ancient Italian city:

Here in this cemetery, which they began to stroll around once more, the state of not-knowing and not-feeling which belonged to the dead seemed to him closer to resolved happiness than he had ever imagined possible.

 And so we are back in the war.  

New Jersey

This was meant to be a review of Dictionary of Untranslatables, Princeton UP's heroic translation of Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies, that includes entries on familiar words with deep register – Demos, Drive, Duty – and on more seductive obscurities that defy satisfactory translation – Daimôn, Desengaño, Dichtung. But one of the reasons why I can't attempt a normal review is because the Dictionary itself is a model of digression and refuses contemplation en bloc, thus emphasising the threat posed by concepts as a function of the war under which they came to exist in the first place.

As Howard Caygill says in his more conventional review, the urge to produce such a book with its intellectual histories, vast array of diverse interpretations and extensive bibliographies (detail upon detail), "is largely a product of the Enlightenment" and, I would add, a key weapon in an implicit war. We are always on the brink of chaos, perhaps already unknowingly engulfed and grasping for a float.

On page 636 of the Dictionary, ten double-columned pages are launched under the heading MEMORY / FORGETFULNESS. It has four chapters with sub-sections that themselves contain further sub-sections and under them, even more. Under II: The Making of the Past comes D: The fiction of total knowledge and under that is 3: Mallarmé's break with tradition: The freeing of forgetfulness. The entry by the late Jean Bollack is an impressively concise summary of the poet's "Orphic search for a truth hidden within language" and uses his poem Le vierge, le vivace as the defining statement of his art and "which makes forgetfulness a condition of poetic song".

Poetry in the figure of a swan leaves behind it “ce lac dur que hante sous le givre / le transparent glacier des vols qui n’ont pas fui” ( Beneath the frost of a forgotten lake / Clear flights of glaciers not fled away; trans. John Holcombe ). The world of life is thus divided, and also leaves behind the raw matter of frozen traces: “Un cygne d’autrefois se souvient” ( In past magnificence of another day / The swan remembers ). It remembers its lost glory as in a mirror: if it escapes, it is because it has resisted and not given in to incantation and celebration. Its poetic means have transported it elsewhere, and forgetfulness is the line that is crossed by verbal transcendence, with art finding a way to create for itself another world.

The translation used here is not one by which this poem came to me but Robert Lowell's with its "hard, neglectful lake hoarding under ice / a glacier of flights than never fly" and "The swan ruffles, remembers it is he". In this way even a poem that seemed to be an unchanging literary terra firma is now threatened, and this Dictionary is the ocean. Perhaps this is why Thomas Bernhard's wall of prose meant so much to me that day – the novel was the thing itself, the detail was not key but rather the overall movement, the constant working, the constant repetition of sentences shored against the ocean. Moreover, the translation is not exceptionally important: the book is an object added to the world, a gap in the universe and propels itself into existence under that awareness.

Reading on: Diary of the Fall by Michel Laub

In his diary Kafka said he enjoyed reading books of letters and memoirs because they helped him find some distance from himself and become the author's counterpart in their experiences and feelings. Nothing very unusual about that of course; it's why many of us read. Except Kafka recognises the self-deceit involved. On closing the book, he says he's always surprised that such an escape is possible because "experience inclines us to think that nothing in the world is further removed from an experience than its description". The experience he refers to here is his own writing tormented by a dynamic of trust and suspicion. In 1904 it's an "axe for the frozen sea inside us", in 1922 it is a "descent to the dark powers". At this time however, as a reader, he recommends submitting to a book in order to find "a clear road into what is most human".

What needs to be noted about this entry is that it is written in the third person plural and that I have assumed it is Kafka speaking for himself, as if the experience that inclined him to think that nothing in the world is further removed from an experience than its description is itself an experience and, in order to be written down, has to be removed from any connection to the singular self. Syntax sets Kafka at a distance.

Michel Laub's Diary of the Fall is presented as its title suggests in short, labelled entries written in the first person, lulling us into the comfort and security of a singular self. This allows the reader to do exactly as Kafka recommends because a diary immediately engages one in a confidential drama removed from the formal procedure of a literary novel. It is also one with which we will feel entirely familiar as readers of literary novels: the mystery of a man who survived Auschwitz and then killed himself in middle-age, leaving only mystery in his wake. Much later his son discovers a notebook containing only idiosyncratic definitions of certain words. Nothing is so far from the son as his father's experience, and there is no access except this notebook. To add to the burden, he has now been diagnosed with Alzheimer's and is writing to preserve what memories he has left. The diary of the grandson then – the novel we are reading – rises up between the twin voids of past and future with a question inherent to the diary form: what does it all mean? In the grandson's case: his alcoholism, his successive marriages and the bullying of the only non-jew in his school, a boy from a poor, single-parent family. The question "What does it all mean?" thereby assembles the ingredients of a classic literary fictional dish: race, class, guilt, history, inheritance, obsession, addiction and memory.

While this sounds like the next prize-winning novel you won't be able to put down or forget, there is something peculiarly resistant about Diary of the Fall: it is so easy to read, its personable narration insinuating so effortlessly these resonant themes, that hints toward an impending revelation never stop coming, yet which never quite arrives. Surely, I thought reading on, this design is too easy as a fiction, almost a caricature of a creative writing class exercise to compose a narrative with the most overt, button-pressing themes of literary fiction for this to be the last word. While there is a development – a wholly unremarkable one that only reiterates the novel's generic qualities – I was reminded of Kafka's recommendation and that "reading on" might be the key.

After reading Diary of the Fall, try to find a significant passage and you'll notice there are no page numbers by which to navigate. At first I assumed it was because my advance copy was incomplete, but then I realised it was entirely in keeping with how a diary works: each day is marked to mitigate the extemporaneous repetitions of a solitary voice subject to his own ignorance. Continuity from one page to the next is not important. Both reader and writer are compelled to move forward all the while suspecting what's new is only a feeble recurrence of other entries, other stories and other lives. He imagines his grandfather's experience by reading Primo Levi's If this is a man, raising the possibility that everything we've reading about, including the narrator's own past, is a secondhand reconstitution based entirely on reading. His most pressing memory is the bullying of João, a Christian boy who was left to fall when given the birthday bumps by his Jewish schoolmates. For this to be a real diary, the dovetailing of smaller and larger stories appears too neat. Whatever their truth status, they are disproportionate experiences seeking order in a terrible meaning or meaninglessness. The dairy's own fall is held in abeyance.

What remains is the possibility of meaning and access to experience. To achieve this might mean strengthening or undoing the neat unity imposed by the book. Unwilling or unable to do either, the diary form must enact literary fictional bad faith by obscuring freedom and confinement, formlessness and form, to approach and retreat from its goal, never quite able to convince itself of its value – a dynamic inertia that could go on forever. The author might have used the alibi of most literary novels by "painting rich characters" and introducing violent developments to mask the narrative impasse, so it's admirable that for the most part Michel Laub follows the logic of the form: the grandfather and father, the diarist's wives, João and the events that mark their lives are always only ghostly presences in this nightly dance of the diary. The narrative is relentlessly provisional.

In a metafictional sleight of hand, the diarist wonders if this restraint is enough, a move that raises the issue of intention and mastery. If the fiction is under the author's control, the expression of limits and pained distance suggest that literary fiction is a charade and is as useless as the grandfather's notebook for providing access to experience. The diary format is then a sop to our enduring gullibility. History, he decides, might be "nothing but the accumulation of massacres that lie behind every speech, every gesture, every memory", which would mean every aspect of this unhappy situation is itself the legacy and revelation of disastrous history:

... if Auschwitz is the tragedy that contains in its essence all those other tragedies, it's also in a way proof of the non-viability of human experience at all times and in all places – in the face of which there is nothing one can do or think, no possible deviation from the path my grandfather followed during those years.
                                                                                  (Translated by Margaret Jull Costa)

The grandfather's path was one of repression and suicide, the other, taken by the father, one of stoic realism; a different kind of denial exposed by Alzheimer's. So what is this current path of writing a diary other than a third in which writing reveals only its non-viability as a medium for sharing experience; a likelihood reinforced by its familiarity as a literary product? Writing here maintains a relationship with experience like bare feet tracing a sinkhole beneath an increasingly threadbare carpet, unwilling or unable to fall through. Perhaps the ambiguity between unwilling and unable is what Kafka meant by "what is most human".

Boyhood Island: My Struggle: 3, by Karl Ove Knausgaard

It's been said that Boyhood Island is "the most Proustian" of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle series, and while this is true that both Proust and Knausgaard present intense remembrances of childhood, the same could be said of many other novels, for example Tomas Bannerhed's The Ravens, recently published by the Clerkenwell Press and, like Boyhood Island, a novel of a 1970s childhood set in Scandinavia. Both Proust's and Knausgaard's would surely be lost among them were it not for what sets them apart.

What sets them apart might best be summarised as the lingering uncertainty of their status as novels. For all the differences between the authors that are finally destructive to the casual comparison, there is a common pressure exerted by the formal quality of each narrative voice: an essayistic spirit set within a distinct, first-person predicament refusing the comfortable distance of the knowing third person and, because of that, demanding that the reader participates in the questing nature of the narration.

While the Overture to In Search of Lost Time emerges from the uncertain place between dreaming and wakefulness, Boyhood Island merely introduces a discussion of the status of childhood memory. After a traditional family scene of moving into a new house on a Norwegian island narrated with objective confidence, Knausgaard interrupts the nostalgic flow and admits that he doesn't remember any of it himself: the action and dialogue are inventions based on family legend. As the distance is made explicit, there is no blurring of generic edges.

Memory is pragmatic, it is sly and artful, but not in any hostile or malicious way; on the contrary, it does everything it can to keep its host satisfied. Something pushes a memory into the great void of oblivion, something distorts it beyond recognition, something misunderstands it totally, something, and this something is as good as nothing, recalls it with sharpness, clarity and accuracy. That which is remembered accurately is never given to you to determine. (Translated by Don Barlett)

This is certainly a truism yet, placed before a narrative explicitly based on the author's own life, it introduces anxiety to the mournful dejection that personal memories invariably provoke, making what proceeds less an indulgence than a nervous exploration of what remains. As a writer then, Knausgaard, like Proust, must navigate a path between the total freedom offered by the constraints of genre – amply demonstrated by Tomas Bennerhed's reliance on heavily descriptive prose to dissemble its lack of truth and necessity – and the silence of terminal uncertainty. It is here that Knausgaard retreats from Marcel's quest to recover the living presence of the past and instead sticks to a straightforward narration of everyday life. There are only two, brief, vertiginous diversions that resemble anything like those in the first two volumes and what elevates them beyond fictionalised memoir, and, as a result, the sly and artful come to the fore.

He writes that young Karl Ove took great pleasure in not defecating when he felt the need, sticking his fingers up his backside to smell what he held back, which means we have the author of a six-part autobiographical work reporting that he was anally retentive as a child! He then enjoyed the relief of letting go, a feeling perhaps similar to completing the sixth and final volume of My Struggle. Moreover, he is told off by his teacher for revealing in class the reasons for a classmate's broken home and is told that he should learn some social decorum. Are these anecdotal precursors of later life too good to be true? Sometimes it seems that way, especially as much less trivial events are later pushed toward the void.

The best edition of the Scott Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation

Where Knausgaard might become realigned with Proust is the tension in the book created by opposing ways of life. In Swann's Way, the child Marcel walks two paths in the country surrounding his home: going in opposite directions and accessed by different gates, the Méséglise Way is full of lower class sexuality and sensuous nature, while the Guermantes Way presents the aura of history, nobility and the glamour of high society. Each represents a core example for Marcel's understanding in later life and the potential for happiness – what Deleuze called his apprenticeship to signs. Each has its appeals but are apparently irreconcilable. Which should he choose? Knausgaard has similar paths: the island's wooded landscape full of schoolmates, adventure and exciting temptations, and the one provided at home under the Panoptic gaze of his tyrannical father. How will the boy deal with such competing pressures? Outside he behaves recklessly, testing the limits of his freedom while at home he cringes with fear at the probable consequences. Knausgaard has acknowledged the "dynamic force in this book" is:

the difference between the freedom outside and the prison-like state inside, and how the latter very slowly influences the former, and in the end changes it fundamentally. Another word for that would be integration, I think. The eye of God ends up inside, so that, in the end, you take care of judgment and punishment yourself.

Perhaps a supplication to greater powers sums up the reckoning with the past and present that the book sequence displays and why it began with the death of his father. However, in Time Regained, the adult Marcel takes the Méséglise Way again and discovers it is in fact physically linked to the Guermantes Way; there wasn't such a profound opposition and, in revising his assumptions, makes him more aware of continuities and possibilities for revising ongoing assumptions. The proximity of separate paths turns out to be true of Karl Ove's paths too, leading us to a better comparison than with Proust's novel – that of Kafka and his father, or, more specifically, George Bendemann and his father.

The Judgment begins with Georg's self-assurance that he can write about his life to his friend in Russia without worrying too much about the consequences. Writing is freedom. But this is soon ended by his father when he reveals that the Russian friend knows all about Georg's self-serving behaviour because he, the father, has been in contact with him all along. Georg's suicide then is a submission to the power that reveals itself to be present in writing too. His suicide is the murder of writing by means of writing. Compare this with Karl Ove's actions as his family prepares to leave the island idyll. The teenager finds himself out of God's sight and, at a school camp, he and other boys pursue girls and behave in ways that readers will have to read and judge for themselves, if indeed they notice it all, so cursory is the description. Collusion with other boys is significant here because it dilutes responsibility, allowing the brute instincts of teenagers to stand in for the 'suicide' of the oppressed little Karl Ove; these girls disappear into the distance like a roadkill in a rearview mirror. Writing is as pragmatic as memory.

I guess I have a talent for humiliation, a place within me that experience can’t reach, which is terrible in real life, but something that comes in handy in writing. It seems as though humiliation has become a career for me.

Behind this confession is perhaps what is most disturbing about Boyhood Island: the possibility that father's tyranny is growing in the little boy even as he appears to resist it, or, to be less personal and less judgmental, the manifestation of the manipulative power that secretes itself within even the most open, honest, self-abasing act.