This Space as a book

When this blog turned ten years old in 2014, I decided to make a selection of the best posts to see what it looked like minus blog apparatus. Reading them together in this form, I was pleasantly surprised.

Zero Books is now publishing it as a book with a brilliant introductory essay by Lars Iyer and a cover photo by the exceptionally talented Flowerville. Take a look at the page for some words from, among others, Gabriel Josipovici, Lee Rourke, John Self and Lars himself:

Stephen Mitchelmore was the first literary-critical blogger, and has remained the best. His blog, This Space, ten years in existence, and commanding a wide readership, contains exquisite long-form meditations on literary fiction of the kind only the blogosphere can allow. Gathered here, Mitchemore’s essays show a cumulative power, developing a philosophy of literature in a manner that recalls Blanchot’s The Space of Literature.

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.

Panthers and the Museum of Fire by Jen Craig

"Where now? Who now? When now?"

The famous opening lines of Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable constitute a modern invocation to the gods at the start of an epic. Only this one appears not at the beginning, not even in medias res, but at the end, where there are no gods, and no end.

"I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know"

Answers emerge to provide aesthetic balance, if nothing else, but at least one is conclusive: the unnamable has a name of sorts ('the Unnamable') and the positive spin placed on the words that follow – "you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on" – has enabled writers to accommodate them as gee-ups from a personal trainer as they climb the purgatorial mountain of Literary Achievement. Pick up any contemporary novel, read the first paragraph and see how each sets down the where, the who and the when right from the start, as if to go on is rather to go back.

Appeals to explicit subject matter and dramatic events have become invocations in a godless time, as we seek a grounding in the hereafter of writing. What's especially notable then about Jen Craig's Panthers and the Museum of Fire is how it destablises such invocations:

For a long time I have dreamed of such a breakthrough, I thought as I set off from my flat in Glebe on that Monday morning – walking to a café in Crown Street for no other reason than to meet the sister, Pamela, so that I could give her back the manuscript Panthers and the Museum of Fire supposedly unread, as she had insisted on the phone only two days after she'd given it to me.

This is both straightforward and unaccountable: the specific where is an anonymous spot on the way between the two places where the ostensible action is, the who is the narrative I, perhaps Jen Craig herself – but then who wrote the manuscript with the same title as the book we're reading? – and when is the walk itself, except it appears incidental to the reports of the breakthrough and the café meeting, which seem far more significant whens and, as a result, all three entwine to displace any certainty on their priority.

Perhaps priority should be placed on the narrative itself, which would be convenient because writing is exactly what the dreamer regards as the breakthrough she had been seeking, now given so unexpectedly by Panthers and the Museum of Fire, a manuscript written by Sarah, an old school acquaintance, into whom the narrator had bumped on the street one day, leading to a series of events, including Sarah's death, possibly as an indirect result of her excessive weight, culminating in the supposed non-reading of the manuscript. Each event and the narrator's commentary is reported with reference to where she is on the walk between Glebe and the café on Crown Street, with the events that occur on that walk included too, and also with recollections of how she had related the events before the walk to her friend Raf at some point in the recent past, either at a gastropub in Potts Point, or over the preparation of prawns before a dinner back in Glebe, or over the phone to report the remarkable breakthrough she had experienced the night before.

Confused? You won't be.

Sarah's surviving sister had asked the narrator, knowing she had literary flair, to read the manuscript discovered in her papers, with a view to making something of it, perhaps redemption for Sarah's otherwise sad and lonely existence, an existence not helped by the narrator's tactical avoidance of her. Instead it redeems the narrator's existence, with the odd parallel being that the narrator's name is the same as the Jenny Craig weight loss company, or would be had she not shortened it, which is expanded upon in another odd parallel when the narrator explains she had been anorexic at the time the company had made its name, causing her all kinds of social grief.

No anorectic can bear advice, and particularly no advice that touches on or even seems to touch on our inviolate selves. [...] All those who haven't been anorexic themselves have no idea about anorexia because they have never led an anorexic existence, and it is the anorexic existence – the nature of this existence – which matters more than anything else in the world to an anorexic. An anorexic needs to exist in this way because there is nothing else in their existence but existence itself; everything else in the world they have given up for this existence; the anorectic is an addict of the anorexic existence.

While this might draw us to comparisons with the self of Kafka's Hunger Artist unviolated by nourishment and, like Sarah, dying off-screen, except in her case apparently from too much nourishment, it would be better read in tandem with Metamorphosis, as change is the horror driving that story, with the previously inviolate selves of Gregor and Grete undergoing transformations right at the beginning and right at the end, with Sarah as Gregor to the narrator's Grete; one's death allowing the other to stretch her limbs or, in this case, make a breakthrough in her writing.

Such assertive monologues do then suggest a neurotic focus on self and the inevitability of change: the stability of former being dependent on the latter only in its stubborn resistance. This is a theme consistent with Jen Craig's first novel Since the Accident, in which the narrator's sister, the one for whom change came in catastrophic form, describes how a closing door had changed her attitude to the art workshop she had just attended as part of her recovery:

It was stupid, she said, and it was only a measure of her suggestibility after the workshop that she should have let herself be panicked by a door that was sliding shut. She'd thought until that moment that, unlike the others, she hadn't been affected by all the talk of creativity and images at the workshop, but the door had shown her otherwise. Before the workshop, she thought, the door would just have been a door and not a symbol of an impending disaster or an urgent and life-changing choice.

The fear of impending disaster, caused by an excessive attention to signs, is of course the disaster itself and, worse, appears to be prompted by what we otherwise assume to be its consolation: artful self-expression. The comedy and distress of the situation is very much in keeping with the experience of Panthers and the Museum of Fire, which is neither one of comedy nor of distress but both at the same time, impossible to separate, and in which the entangling energy of the narrative is at one with the panicked immobility of the narrator.

The bizarre title, about which I'm sure you're still asking, embodies these dynamic oppositions, as the intrigue and promise in panthers and fire is then displaced by mundane facts. The words come from road signs pointing to a rugby league club called the Panthers and a genuine museum of fire, both with gift shops selling even more signs on T-shirts and mugs. Except the title, like the signs on the T-shirts and mugs, retains the promise of something beyond rugby club and museum, even if they are found in the rugby club and museum, a promise found in a manuscript only ever present as a title, as a sign of things to come. Where now? Who now? When now?

Such promise and its displacement reminds me of the author of the line Es ist alles lächerlich, wenn man an den Tod denkt, and anyone who loves the work of this author will find similar, blessed relief in Jen Craig's fiction. For all their differences, they share an unaccountable joy in writing within absurdity and impossibility, despite and because of absurdity and impossibility. It is from Thomas Bernhard's acceptance speech when he received the Austrian State Prize for literature and caused a government minister to storm out of the building in disgust. Everything is ridiculous when one thinks of death – perhaps the ultimate breakthrough.



Jen Craig blogs at Being in Lieu and Absurd Enticements.

'Foreign to the resources of literature'

In the early days of blogging, I often wrote about book prizes. At that time I trusted the aura of a shortlist, drawn by what I assumed was the light of Literature shining down and carving deep relief into the profile of an otherwise flat novel. But I also often complained precisely because once read the books themselves didn't seem to deserve such attention, while others that did were ignored. After a while, in fact after serving on a jury, it became clear that I was fascinated instead by the aura of the impersonal force of a collective honour rather than in the books themselves. The books themselves are incidental, as a glance at the titles of previous winners will confirm. For me the aura now illuminates only the book equivalent of the picture of Dorian Gray decaying in an attic while below literary professionals in brightly lit rooms swoon over its prettified worldly companion. Yes, prize-winning literary novels are a genre in themselves: rhetorical exercises, inbred descendents of mummified classics rather than sui generis acts of writing. Nothing to see here. But sometimes the shock of what prizes overlook is a revelation.

Last week the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist was announced. At the time I took even less notice than usual, indifferent to the predominance of predictable titles and their keeny blurbs, but I then discovered that Mathias Énard's Zone, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, was eligible and had been entered and yet is not featured. This astonished me. I found out only because its absence prompted an unofficial shadow jury of bloggers to add it to their longlist. For a detailed review, see Max Cairnduff's, which includes links to other coverage.

The shock is a minor one and this is not a post to complain of its omission or to speculate on the competence of the judges – in 2013 the prize didn't go to Vila-Matas' sublimely light Dublinesque, so hope has long flown – and instead to wonder if the failure of such novels to walk away with such a title is a sign of the necessity and vitality of no-genre writing, in which form and content struggle into existence on their own merit rather than rushing to adopt a generic mould for safe passage, and that it is only committed amateurs on the sidelines, those not on a career path or with corporate sponsors to appease, who are able to subject themselves to the full force of writing as a presence in itself.

No

-genre is most noticeable when conservative responses to innovative literature are raised, hence the value of prizes. It is nothing new: at the beginning of Samuel Beckett's life writing in French, Maurice Blanchot recommended him for a major award, and failed:

In a way, when Molloy, then Malone Dies first appeared in France, it was naïve of us (Georges Bataille, Maurice Nadeau and myself) to hope to alert the Prix des Critiques to these texts, even though so many remarkable writers and critics were on that committee, admittedly still as members of the 'literary establishment', when it was clear that even Beckett's early books were foreign to the resources of 'literature'.

And, after his death, Anthony Burgess predicted Beckett's reputation would descend, no doubt as a sign that his renown was an aberration in literary appreciation. In his posthumous tribute, Blanchot seeks to distance Beckett from the greats to whom he is compared in obituaries (Proust, Joyce, Musil, Kafka), regarding his work (but "there is no work in Beckett") as something less (or more) than literature; that is, what I call no-genre. So we might dwell on that phrase Foreign to the resources of 'literature' and wonder what it might mean when browsing the conveyor belt of recommended good reads.

Without doubt Dublinesque and Zone are very literary novels in the obvious sense: full of explicit allusions – the first to Beckett himself, the second to Apollinaire's poem Beckett had translated – but literary in another, less recognised sense too. As my review of the latter argues, the value and meaning of writing is never a given, is always under question within the work itself – is indeed an accelerant for its own flame – and its gifts doubted or resisted even as they are received. Of course, as Beckett's example suggests, even the most resistant to the gifts only burden us with more, becoming a resource itself, with the lamentable genre label Beckettian. Blanchot's claim, however, is Beckett's writing is "simply an attempt to keep within the limits of literature that voice or rumble or murmur which is always under the threat of silence", which might be a voice from the inside – "When you listen to yourself, it's not literature you hear" – or something from the outside – which is how I read the first two volumes of Knausgaard's My Struggle. So the paradoxical imperative to speak when speaking drowns out the murmur is the great challenge for whoever senses its demand; a challenge that might (still paradoxically) require passivity and weakness rather than mastery and strength, and perhaps inevitably, necessarily, wonderfully never prize-winning.

A blog comes to one in the dark

What follows the break wasn't going to be posted. I wrote it last week and decided it would be more effective to summarise on my Tumblr blog and then publicise on Twitter. To my surprise, bar one message of support, there was no response. The silence was instructive.

In the early days of February 2015, 3AM Magazine advertised an event in London to celebrate "the recent boom in online criticism" and to encourage readers "to get involved in the growth of digital literary culture". My interest was piqued, as the subject is close to my heart and is rarely discussed in fleshy public, for the obvious reason that those who produce it must do so from their disparate basements in Terre Haute.

Indeed, the event was to be held in big London and I was unable to attend. Still, as I have been writing online about books, mainly on blogs, since as recently as 1996 and am familiar with many of those who do the same, I was keen to see who was speaking and what the reference points might be. It turned out I had heard of one of the six panellists and knew one other personally.

It was to discuss:

• the implications for contemporary literary culture 
• the distinctive challenges and opportunities facing the new generation of online literary journals 
• the democratisation of criticism in the online landscape: in a world without journalistic gatekeepers, can anyone be a critic? 

While the first is so vague as to mean nothing and the second as euphemistic as a corporate press release (challenges = redundancies, opportunities = bend over), the third is very clear. The third is ... well, everything. This is because the panel includes only one person who is a recognised literary critic and not one who has ever been a literary blogger, that is, not one who might be able to talk about the form from the inside.

As soon as I read about the panel, I tweeted a question concerning this curious situation. There was, after all, still time to invite a London literary blogger for their insight. I didn't get an answer. The only response was for a well-known US critic to favourite the tweet. However, Flowerville noted what I had overlooked wearing my blogger-goggles:

As you can see, there were no responses to this either.

On the day itself, the event was publicised on a webpage and the link retweeted by a panellist.

Once again I tweeted, only this time with the bitter assumption that nobody would respond. I was then blocked by the same panel member. Still, while there was no woman on the panel, at least naked female mannikins were on display.

While this is a storm in an espresso cup, it is exemplary of a distinct campaign of middle-class revanchism in British culture. Where amateurs and outsiders had dominated, professionals are taking their place. The great Morrissey, the finest bloom of the flowering of postwar British culture borne on a welfare state won by an organised and compassionate working class, has noticed this in his own field:

In the guise of serving the public, the Brit Awards have hijacked modern music in order to kill off the heritage that produced so many interesting people, to such a degree that we could not imagine anyone who has ever truly affected the course of British music to be on stage at the 02 collecting a deserved award.

The major music TV event of the year is now about marketing "acts" manufactured by talent managers, business managers, brand managers.

With this in mind, note the labels given to each of 3AM's panellists: Co-editor in Chief, Contributing Editor, Senior Editor, Founder and Editor, Novelist and Publisher, Digital Publisher. The titles are impressive and I have no argument with them or the talent and hard work they signify, but contrast them with the titles of those who laid the foundations for online criticism's "recent boom": plain Blogger. It appears we must now submit to a professional hierarchy. So in addition to there being not one woman and not one blogger on the panel, there is not one person without a CV of such note; not one non-professional, working-class voice. Blogging for years and building a reputation and audience counts for nothing. Again.

Of course, this person could get involved, sans CV and anonymously, that is, they could perhaps buy a train ticket, travel to the big city and spectate. They might not be blocked and might even be allowed to speak, if invited, but what they say would always remain secondary, always dependent on permission from the high table.

Sugar Aping

This is an unexpected consequence of online literary magazines usurping the space blogs once occupied, and rather than reinventing the form, they mimic the broadsheet book pages from which the internet was meant to liberate us. For many years writers developed an audience relying solely on the quality of their work. For them, as it was for TS Eliot, criticism is as natural as breathing, or indeed necessary for breath. Blogging was about paying attention, exploration, discovery and sharing. Now editorial patronage is key and replaces radical possibilities with gatekeeping.

The host of this event, 3AM Magazine, is a prime mover. The step change became clear to me when the "Reviews editor" launched a personal attack on three unnamed but clearly identifiable working-class writers whose work is "exclusively online (their writing is so tedious that no editor would commit it to print)" under the cover of a review that didn't even address the book's contents with anything like good faith. In fact, it repeated the condescension and misrepresentation the book drew in the corporate print media. The reviewer's bracketed aside, even if it were true (and there are numerous examples to refute it), demonstrates the instinct to appeal to professional authority, where power and money relieves any need for justice. As 3AM's pages lack a comments section, attempts to challenge such calumny are stifled at birth. So much for "getting involved".

Later, the same reviews editor posted another review of a debut novel summarised as "an awful book", one that prompted the reader to want "to hurl the fucking thing across the room" (James Wood this is not). The author of the novel subsequently tweeted the news that there may be more than literary motivations at work here (though on his side such motives might have been strongly at work in relation to a certain "full-length novel" not having yet seen the light of day). When concerns were put to the "Editor in chief" that privileged access to its pages was being used to pursue undeclared personal grudges, the reply came back that 3AM was "open to different points of view" (apart from those it isn't) and indeed any requests for basic decency, honesty and fairness would only encourage more such reviews "for the sheer hell of it".

As Flowerville has shown elsewhere, this policy isn't restricted to 3AM Magazine, and has nothing to do with democracy, pluralism or a commitment to free speech but the very nature of "dudenation" editorial policy; one must share the "gatekeeper's mostly adolescent male mind" for the sheer hell of being published. The aspiring critic must realise that compromising to further a career – even one as lacking in reward as writing online – and thereby winning the protection and authority of a magazine title, means compromise becomes that career.

It would be too much to expect this state of affairs to prompt a Peter Oborne-like gesture from the co-editor in chief who blocked me, let alone a document like the September Statement produced by professional philosophers concerning the behaviour of an influential academic. But internet literary magazine culture certainly requires serious attention to renew its radical beginnings.

Oh, and by the way, guess who 3AM is publishing now.


An indication to the cause

Why is this happening? While I have argued that it is down to professionals moving into the domain where amateurs flourish, it is also perhaps a product of literature and how we respond to it. This is suggested in volume two of My Struggle, in which Karl Ove Knausgaard writes about how, as a young man, poems never opened themselves to him: "When I approached them I felt like a fraud, and I was indeed always unmasked, because what they always said as well, these poems, was: Who do you think you are, coming in here?". Not knowing how to open poetry, he felt a judgment had been passed and his literary dreams were pathetic mirages on the horizon: "I was an ordinary man who would live an ordinary life and find meaning where I was, nowhere else". One alternative, he explains, is to deny your feelings and "to stay afloat in that world without literature ever opening up to you".

You could write a whole dissertation about Hölderlin, for example, by describing the poems, discussing what they dealt with and in what ways the themes found expression, through the syntax, the choice of words, the use of imagery, you could write about the relationship between Hellenic and Christian modes, about the role of the countryside in his poems, about the role of the weather, or how the poems relate to the actual politico-historical reality in which they had arisen, independent of whether the main emphasis was on the biographical, for example, his German Protestant background, or on the enormous influence of the French revolution. You could write about his relationship to other German idealists, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, Novalis, or the relationship to Pindar in the late poems. You could write about his unorthodox translations of Sophocles, or read the poems in light of what he says about writing in his letters. You could also read Hölderlin’s poetry with reference to Heidegger’s understanding of it, or go one step further and write about the clash between Heidegger and Adorno over Hölderlin. You could also write about the whole history of his work’s reception, or of his works in translation. It was possible to do all of this without Hölderlin’s poems ever opening themselves up. The same could be done with all poets, and of course it has been.   (Translated by Don Bartlett)

This is surely the experience of so many of us seeking to deal with the judgment literature passes down. Many of us have accepted fate and sought to stay afloat in denial. (Some are so floaty that they are invited onto panels.) But I have never been able to square admiration for such scholarship with the fact of literature, the utter remove onto which writing sometimes opens, something that I sense opening in Knausgaard's own work despite the ostensibly banal, terrestrial focus. How is such work possible and why does criticism avoid this space? How can it indeed approach the void opened by its own practice?


Reinvention

One answer is for criticism to seek to literature in criticism itself. That is, to seek the space in which critical writing opens onto this remove. This is how the online literary magazine might be reinvented. I have a dream in which the content of such a site is determined by constraints, as in Lars Iyer's Dogma, in which Lars and W. constrain the writing of conference papers: Dogma is spartan (don't use quotations). Dogma is full of pathos (rely on emotion). Dogma is sincere (speak with seriousness). There are many others. I have a dream in which this magazine has only a homepage, with two or three discrete columns, each one written by a different person but each discussing the same subject, the same thinker, the same event, the same poem, the same book. The focus would then be on the subject and the quality of writing and each writer would be writing beside and against their fellows in the same space.

A similar project was pursued by Maurice Blanchot with the Revue Internationale, a failed utopia described here by the same Lars Iyer, in which "total critique" was the goal. Perhaps it is inevitable that such attempts lead to a neutralising blandness, if not also to 3AM's reactionary hit pieces. So instead, I would recommend those of you who share Knausgaard's experience to pursue your own work on a solitary or small group blog with a focus on truth and necessity rather than reception, to seek your own identity as a writer, to wait for literature to open, however long and lonely the journey; to lie down in the dark and, like Beckett's narrator, listen. A blog comes to one in the dark. Imagine.

In daylight, we can all then watch wide-eyed as the literary internet is otherwise expropriated, with the events such as Literature 2.0 providing a fig-leaf for the banality and careerism to come.

Albertine Asleep

For a short time, I stayed up most of the night. In the long summer months between years at school – my guess is 1978 – there was no all-night radio let alone all-night television. Instead I would listen to the BBC World Service on unreliable Medium Wave reception. One night around two in the morning, an actor with a mellifluous voice read an extract from what I now know as Swann's Way. This was before Terence Kilmartin had updated Scott Moncrieff's original translation.

Next day, as I played football in the local park, I told my friends of this book that spent half an hour to describe someone (Swann) ringing a doorbell. Inside, however, my amused tone was tempered. Secretly, I was impressed. The following week there was an extract from another part of the novel, of which I have no memory, and in the third and final week, he read the section known as Albertine Asleep (which Anne Carson has had some fun with recently). And I taped it. The tape still exists.

Book of forgotten dreams

For eighteen years I have wanted the English translation of Georges Bataille's book La Peinture Préhistorique: Lascaux ou la naissance de l'art, ever since Maurice Blanchot's review essay appeared in the collection Friendship published in 1997. A strange yearning because Blanchot had summarised the content, so there was apparently nothing to gain and, what's more, I have never been a big Bataille reader, much preferring at university Blanchot's unparalleled prose to the jargon-scarred theory beloved of my fellow students who thought "transgression" meant wearing rubber.

Still, there was something withheld by this book, the actual thing, the physical object, in its absence. Unfortunately, the edition from Albert Skira's Great Centuries of Painting series, described by one scholar as a "highbrow coffee table book", has been out of print since 1955 and secondhand copies have always been too expensive, often approaching three figures. Until late one night last November when desultory book searching revealed one in good condition for under £50. In a moment of madness, I clicked Buy Now and sat back to dwell on the extravagance.

Taking delivery of a desired book often signals the end of possibility and the settling of melancholy in the prospect of the real thing finally arriving and dissolving the aura. And then there are the heavy demands of procedural content. Reading is bound to kill the possible book, the Platonic form revolving in your head, the edition of Bolaño's 2666 Kirsty Logan described a few years ago. So it was my good fortune that Prehistoric Paintings: Lascaux or the Birth of Art got lost in the post. For two weeks I waited, anticipating each furtive visit from the postman and panicking once he had left. How could I have been so careless to waste fifty quid?! Wasn't this punishment for transgressing the line between desire and its realisation?

In hope I walked to the post office depot to enquire. A queue lined the pavement outside. After fifteen minutes of standing around and shuffling forward in the cold, they said, Yes, they had a package for me but they couldn't hand it over because I didn't have a red card from the postman. What? But I'm here, now, so why not hand it over? No, that can't be done. At least let me see the parcel to prove to myself that it exists. No, that wasn't possible. They said they would have to redeliver it. Would tomorrow be OK? Yes, it would. This was good news, and I went home happy. Of course, the following day nothing arrived. I walked the post office depot again. The queue was even longer and, after half an hour of standing around and shuffling forward in the cold, the man behind the counter just shrugged. I went home unhappy and eventually gave up caring.

A few days later the bell rang and the postman handed over an A3-sized package. Having ordered a Radio Times holder as a gift for a telly addict, I had my doubts about what it contained and tore at the parcel carefully. The first thing exposed was the spine of a book. So just look at it for a moment, shining there.

The bright colours suggested a brand new book rather than one published sixty years ago. So this is what its absence withheld! On removing the cardboard slipcase and opening the book, five black and white postcards with serrated edges fell out.

Pasted on the inside cover were three visitor tickets to three different caves. Souvenirs of another life. When the previous owner visited is unclear, but Lascaux was closed to visitors in 1963.

These small discoveries were the prelude to the content.

A miracle occurred at Lascaux, Bataille says, a miracle that remains before us in the "clear and burning presence" of these paintings. His rapture is evident, and it is rare for a world-weary reader to feel he shares in the author's wonder, lifting the pages to see what's next and reading the words so large and clear that they could have been typed directly onto the page. A similar edition written by Captain Cook or Neil Armstrong might compare. The production values are such that the illustrations are separate items, pasted onto the page.

"What transfixes us is the vision, present before our very eyes, of all that is most remote. Of our presence in the real world."

The paradox in the words of the caption, that being close to ourselves whilst in proximity to what is most remote, is explained here as the "strong and intimate emotion" of religion or, better, "the sacred", to which the cave paintings are "more solidly attached to than it has ever been since". This is not religion as one more additional theory but as the catalyst of humankind, when the creature wandering the icy plains descended into the caves and, in the remove of darkness and solitude, set itself apart from the animal kingdom and discovered itself, codifying the cosmos with paint. As Richard White puts it, this is "not the sacred as the beyond, another realm of being that exists in opposition to this one—but the sacred as the deep reality of this life that we are typically alienated from". So we shouldn't include these moments perusing the book with the usual "Oh I like that" pleasures of the art gallery but as the kindling of the effects of art was it when born; that is, when we were born, perhaps the deeper feeling we have in galleries we have since been socialised to restrain. Whatever, the miracle is foundational.

Bataille says that in looking at the cave paintings in Lascaux "we are left painfully in suspense by this incomparable beauty and the sympathy it awakens in us", and something close to this is what I experience looking at the book, if this can be called an experience. One is not transported in awe towards fantastical otherness but toward a fog-bound interior, as comforting as it is alien. "It is as though paradoxically our essential self clung to the nostalgia of attaining what our reasoning self had judged unattainable, impossible." This is where I ask: what can be done with this suspense and sympathy if our reasoning self is how we measure experience?

The remainder of Prehistoric Paintings examines each area of the cave to elaborate the author's theory that art served as a channel for the animality enduring in the human community provoked by the taboos of death and sexuality. One reader, stepping forth with good reason, describes the book as "a lot of flowery writing that implies interpretations not necessarily supported by evidence", and it is this inevitable doubt and the scientific innocence that seems to me where the book is worthwhile. In his review, Blanchot suggests that it is from this subterranean overflow that humankind appears, because it reveals our separation from animals, over which we now recognise our power of life and death, and yet, at the same time, exposes us to a death blissfully unknown to animals, thereby weakening us. However, we modern humans value this unique quality over everything, so much that what Blanchot says weakened us is now what we believe makes us stronger.

"The marvelous never loses its impact"

Bataille criticises the "timidity" of scholars who speak "with undue reserve" of what they see in the caves and thereby neutralise the effect of the marvelous on their studies. The "marvelous" then is that which is "not necessarily supported by evidence", and it is only an accredited scholar's book, such as The Mind in the Cave (2002) that can provide such evidence. However, while David Lewis-Williams is a professor emeritus of the Rock Art Research Institute in Johannesburg, his book suggests Bataille's wonderment is vital for appreciating the caves, or at least to get closer to their creation. He explains that they were not created in sober rationality, not in the light of day but in states of consciousness we have devalued.

He prefaces his study by presenting "the greatest riddle of archeology – how we became human and in the process began to make art" (my italics), so we see that becoming human is the lacuna. There were Neanderthals in the Middle Paleolithic era who did not make art and then there are Homo Sapiens in the Upper Paleolithic who did. What caused the transition between animal consciousness and that of Homo sapiens?

Lewis-Williams runs through the intellectual history of attempts to explain the transition – Darwinian, Marxist, Structuralist and Evolutionary Psychological, though not Bataille's – before setting out studies of the art and beliefs of the San of southern Africa that were made before they were swallowed up by modernity. Homo sapiens have a higher consciousness than that of the Neanderthals, which allowed us to develop a fully modern language system, enabling us to "fashion...individual identities and mental 'scenes' of past, present and future events". But, crucially, we also have access to the lower end of the spectrum, altered states of consciousness such as dreams and trance states, brought on by communal rituals, dance and hallucinogens. Language enabled us to see these alternative realities, to hear inner voices and to articulate them to others. The cave paintings, Lewis-Williams argues, are attempts to fix these visions, to enable those who made them to touch "what was already there" in the spirit world. They are not representations of spirits but the spirits themselves.

These dreams, sounds and visions revealed a cosmological order. Humanity's creation of the sacred was thereby possible only because of altered states of consciousness. And while Lewis-Williams' prefatory sentence implicitly rejects Bataille's thesis that art as practised by early humans precipitated its own emergence, he is as critical of Western scientists as Bataille for neglecting what he calls "the autistic end" of the spectrum of consciousness. As a result, their studies follow a positivist route in which intelligence and rationality become the defining characteristics of humanity and the manifest destiny of early people was grow to become "more and more like Western scientists". They are made in their own image.

Yet we have the same neurological structure as early humans and, as Bataille reports, we respond with a curious, even painful sympathy to an art that transcends aesthetic pleasure. Cave painting, according to both Bataille and Lewis-Williams, is then not an addition to human society but constitutive of it. Lewis-Williams writes of the San that hierarchies developed according to those who had better access to the spirit world governing all life: "Art and religion were therefore socially divisive". Every member of a community had access to dreams and were keen to learn more, so were influenced by male and female "shamans" and took part in their rituals. Art and religion, art and the sacred, were indistinguishable and "image-making did not merely take place in the spirit world: it also shaped and created the world."

It is a world we have long left behind, with commonsense and the insomnia of scientific method having replaced superstition and shamanic dreams in shaping our universe. To most modern minds, this is an unquestionable good. But it leads to a troubling question: if humankind emerged and grew to be itself out of reverence for what was revealed in realms of consciousness we now not only neglect but regard with suspicion, even as intellectual taboo, is our existence vitally impoverished?

Perhaps my unaccountable wish to own a copy of Bataille's highbrow coffee table book reveals a buried giant of a need for the elemental in art more generally sublimated into gushing about "the wonder of nature". Such eruptions of the old fascination with dreams to be found in our confused response to art and artists, books and writers, movies and directors, and invariably contained by the intervention of biographical exposés, won't go away even in their diminished state, and indeed occasionally break through into polite society. It is implicitly approached in what has been recently labelled the Hard Problem of consciousness, itself a controversial outgrowth of cognitive science, and the explicit paradox of a debate dependent on its own immaterial space yet able to address it only in the autism of empirical discourse is the elephant in the room. However, to continue to the wildlife theme, it is suppressed, like moles on a bowling green, with the back of a humanist's spade. With this proscription of the sacred, however it is defined, deeply in place, it would seem a new kind of transgression is required. Except this is precisely the realm of true art. As Bataille writes: "only art expresses the prohibition with beseeming gravity, and only art resolves the dilemma [of proscription]. It is the state of transgression that promotes the desire, the need for a more profound, a richer, a marvelous world, the need, in a word, for a sacred world".

A year in (hardly) reading

This has been the worst year for reading, ever. In quantity that is: only a suitcase of books finished, with a communal binful for those abandoned. The reason is the same as four years ago, only worse, and has little to do with the quality of the books. Medical opinion quoted Beckett: nothing to be done.

Still, I've never been one to devour books and I maintain a certain amount of disgust for the conveyor belt of recommended reads. In trust I have opened novels much praised by bloggers to sample the first paragraph and invariably it is like walking into soft sand: the sudden dip of the first sentence, the cinematic swoop of graceful atmospherics, the psychic mind-tap of the lead character for some comforting intimacy, and then the drama heavily flagged by the titillating blurb. Trudge, trudge. Only another 400 pages of these thrills to go.

Lars Iyer's Wittgenstein Jr and Tao Lin's Taipei stood out as relief from such embedded protocols, both narrating from a position of fascination, uncertainty, weakness, anxiety, horror, even, rather than from confidence borne on generic mastery. So too is Hotel Andromeda by Gabriel Josipovici, and I was disappointed (but not surprised) that it didn't get more reviews. David Winters' superb appreciation made up for their general absence. The reviewer's own new book of essays will be that rare thing in contemporary English literature: a serious non-academic book about fiction. There should be more.



The lack of satisfactory novel-reading made 2014 unusual for me in that rather than rush toward the New Atheists' fundamentalism and read books of science and journalism, I began to read German theology. While I am used to what it resembles in continental philosophy, the focus and references in Jürgen Moltmann's The Crucified God (1973) and Karl Barth's Dogmatics in Outline (1946), are alien to someone from an entirely secular background. Despite or because of this foreign nature, it was here that I found the pressure and urgency missing from philosophical procedure and literary criticism, as the actuality, meaning and significance of Christ's execution provided a visceral centre to what might otherwise descend into debates about how many angels can download to a Pinterest account. This means it points toward the necessary direction and purpose of fiction better than most criticism.

The Christian faith which once 'conquered the world' must also learn to conquer its own forms when they have become worldly. It can do so only when it breaks down the idols of the Christian West, and, in a reforming and revolutionary way, remembers the 'crucified God'.

As these books are not exactly easy to write about, this blog will not be taking an overtly theological turn. Two other works of non-fictional, one new, one 60 years old, have made a huge impression recently and I'll be writing about them next year. But in the meantime, back to what I read last year.

Stepping out of the present once again, I bought Galley Beggar's "Digital Classics" reissue of Denton Welch's A Voice Through a Cloud because it is a memoir of the author's slow recovery from a cycling accident, and I indulged self-pity even if he doesn't. As the world returned to him through a cloud of bedridden pain, Welch's warming "bathetic gloom" – Alan Bennett in a black roll neck – made his condition seem like a necessary correlate to the condition of England in the 1930s, and thereby of our own low, dishonest decade as we appease another fascist putsch, this time in Kiev. Unfortunately that book remains unfinished because a PDF is easily neglected and bookmarks don't easily stick to the screen.

Books I had high hopes for, Damon Galgut's Arctic Summer, Krzysztof Michalski's The Flame of Eternity and Knausgaard's Boyhood Island, were ultimately disappointing, perhaps because they are content with the familiarity of their individual forms. Yet one book that remained solidly within what it says it is on the cover was the most moving I read all year, so perhaps this wasn't the reason for these disappointments. An entry written in Virginia Woolf's Sussex cottage in 1926 after reading Maurice Baring's novel C speaks to the same doubts and impatience expressed above and ends with characteristic trust in the imperative to write:

Easy to say it is not a great book. But what qualities does it lack? That it adds nothing to one's vision of life, perhaps. Yet it is hard to find a serious flaw. My wonder is that entirely second rate work like this, poured out in profusion by at least 20 people yearly, I suppose, has so much merit. Never reading it, I get into the way of thinking it nonexistent. So it is, speaking with the utmost strictness. That is, it will not exist in 2026; but it has some existence now, which puzzles me a little. Now Clarissa [Dalloway] bores me; yet I feel this is important. And why?