Spurious

Darkness Visible

Wasn't I supposed to write about Golding's Darkness Visible? Didn't I write some notes on the inside cover as I read it over a number of afternoons in a cool room in Portugal? It began unpromisingly, didn't it? - I couldn't help but compare those opening pages with a bunch of conscript firemen in a bombed out London of the second world war (was it London?) with Henry Green's Caught. Golding didn't compare, that was until the story really began - Matty's story, the child who came out of a fire with half his face burnt away. Who emerged, walking in a straight line, determined.

The story follows Matty now, and leaves the firemen behind, and it's magnificently quick - sentence darts after sentence. Sentence moving quickly after sentence, and what a story, events piling on events in quickness. It's a bit like Coetzee's Michael K., I thought to myself. A kind of outsider character, a kind of husk, who undergoes adventures where all he does is - survive. Where he is fated to survive as though it was decided before him by the gods. Only it's better than Coetzee's book, which is too much like a hagiography, especially when that second narrative voice comes in, when is it, in part two or part three, the officer who captures the protagonist, who watches over and observes him in a manner too close to Coetzee's nameless narrator. And besides, Golding's prose is, though smooth, more rugged that Coetzee's - it weighs more. It comes from the old earth, from the gods, from Greek tragedy and the like. There is a pagan sensibility to Golding that's even older than the Greeks.

And so I rushed along reading, surprised, continually surprised by events. Matty's in Australia! Matty's been castrated by an aborigone! Matty's back in England! Matty's back working at a school like his old school! All wondrous, in the rush of the story. And then the marvellous passages from Matty's diaries: he believes himself to be visited (to be called before) supernatural beings, who charge him with a supernatural task. These are pages of high imagination, who would have expected them at the unpromising beginning? What work of strange imagination! What a peculiar sensibility is Golding's!

And then the first part of the book ends. The second part, seemingly unconnected to the first, has the same narrative momentum. It's Sophy's story - we don't know who she is, but the narrative conjures her up marvellously real, beginning at her twelth year or so. But it is like reading another novel - how are these incidents related to Matty's, and where is Matty? what's happened to Matty, who's quite won as over whether as protagonist of a third person narrative or as a writer of diaries. But on the story ploughs through the earth, and we still trust Golding, for Sophy is rendered very real, too marvellously, concretely real.

What happens next? Part three, and another narrative perspective. Talk starts, a great deal of windbaggery, and it is here, for me, the story has begun to scatter. Too much talk! And who cares about these characters, these dreary little-Englanders? Already we've had intimations of how the story of Sophy (and her twin) will join up with Matty's. And we've even had a few more marvellous, moving passages from Matty's journal (essential pages, blessed pages). But the story scatters itself with the talk, the endless talk, and now I'm thirty pages from the end, and wondering. I should go on, I know that. But I feel ill-used by Golding. Feel tricked and cheated. I want the rush of the narrative again, not talk. I want to read pages as forward-running as the best pages in Lawrence, want a story written by the most unique of sensibilities, the rarest of writers (I look at Golding's picture for a clue to his strangenesses: I can find nothing). But the talk, the endless dreariness!

I have the book in my bag here in the office. Must finish it, I tell myself. Must finish it and put it away with The Spire, which I read only this year, very late, and that seemed to me the finest postwar English fiction I have read, and which excited me because it was English, and because I expect nothing from English letters. Must - but I feel too betrayed, too let down. So much dreary talk! I put it down in Portugal, but should pick it up back here, this grey morning, But haven't I begun another book since (Saramago's Blindness), and finished another (Buchner's Lenz)? Don't I want to begin another Golding (Paper Men, perhaps?) And isn't there still Pincher Martin to read, a very visual novel that demands too much of one like me who can never be brought to see what would be presented to him in words?

Narrative Eternity

Was that really a book? Is it really over? Naipaul's A Bend in the River ends uncertainly. Oh, not because the story was unresolved in any important way: we know the protagonist will go to England to marry the daughter of his friend as he promised (as was an informal arrangement). He'll get out of the new Africa that grew up all around him - around this son of an old Muslim family on the East coast of the continent, a family who had moved there generations ago from India, and had kept their traditions intact.

In the opening chapters, the protagonist-narrator allows himself to speak from those traditions, to speak corporately, collectively, in the third person plural. Why, I asked myself as I read, is he writing? Why the necessity to write? He doesn't tell us (the composition of the novel plays no part in the novel); but I suppose because his voice had to coalesce from the new uncertainty that had shaken up those traditions.

His family had to move from the East coast, just as he, in the end, will have had to leave his shop and his business in the town in the bend of the river. And not just his family: the Big Man of the capital, the new President has turned his poor country, post-independence, upside down. All the old certainties are gone. Then our narrator speaks from this overturning. Speaks as an individual who was at first an onlooker, and then fell victim to it. The novel, which begins slowly, happily, gathers pace. At the end, everything happens at once, all in a rush. Salim, our narrator, now a man alone, has had to escape. He departs on the steamer, upriver, the Big Man having commandeered the available aeroplanes.

But though the narrative speeds up, its coolness and detachment does not change; its careful 'brown style' (a measured, unelaborate prose, still and reserved) remains unruffled. The events in question did not disturb it. Even when Salim finds himself without a business, even when he's lost in a crowded prison, nothing changes its coolness, its detachment. The prose flows on. And I wonder whether it was this that I wanted to continue, as I put the book down.

The mood of a book (its many moods) remain for a while after reading. I'd finished A Bend in the River at the airport. On the way home, in the taxi, still the mood (the many moods). And still the desire to be sustained by that tranquil prose, by the same calm continuity that allowed everything to be spoken, whether slowly or quickly. Initially, Salim spoke in the third person plural - collectively, corporately, in the knowledge of who he was and what he could expect. Then as the book moved on, this shifted to the first; Salim was a man alone. But there were passages, nonetheless, where something else spoke, or another voice inhabited that of the narrator. These were the transitional passages, the literary equivalent of the 'pillow shots' of Ozu: descriptive moments that might seem to have been intercalated between narrative episodes.

Another 'we' speaks: but who speaks? Not the 'we' of the eternal Africa, the jungle and the river. The narrator wants to note the changes in the vegetation - the new hyacinths the river carries along. He wants us to know the bush is changing. His is not an eternal Africa, then. Not the Jungle without variation. Things are happening, changing, just as a narrative - A Bend in the River itself - opens its wings in the ramshackle town in the bend of the river. Why did I want to remain there, in the river's bend, where the 'we' had not resolved itself into an 'I'; where the bush spoke, the ramshackle town, and the foreigners Salim found stranded there? Why in that narrative eternity, in that eternal noon that, in my memory, burns everything else away?

The Membrane

My Golding phase has run aground on Pincher Martin. Is running aground, because it hasn't defeated me yet; I'm a hundred pages in, and, like its central character, trying to get a grip - on a narrative, not on his rocky outcrop. A grip - but unlike him, I can find no purchase; the narrative, such as it is, runs on without me. Pages of closely printed prose (in a fifty year old Penguin paperback - what history did it have?, I wonder) like a shut door. His rocky island is my glass mountain.

Naipaul, instead, and on a whim, after idly reading some article or another. I selected A Bend in the River from Waterstone's shelves. The girl at the checkout desk she'd always meant to read Naipaul, and I said so had I. Of course, I'd gone 100 pages into The Enigma of Arrival - what defeated me? A lack of abstraction, I think - a lack of prose doing more than being a perfect, perfect mirror. The prose was too balanced! It made me seasick, those calm, calm waters of prose. The book fell away from my grasp as into a pool of water. Let it lie there forever, I thought.

But this rainy morning, I thought to advance a little further into A Bend, having begun it yesterday in the gym. And I'm almost immediately upset - seeking to open the spine a bit wider, to give myself room to read the end of each line, too cramped against the central margin, I fold it open instead and - it cracks. The glue of the book has failed; it's come apart from itself. A broken book. It seems at odd with its calm, calm prose.

I like narratives in the first person, and like it when it is not the protagonist who is the centre of action, but whose presence asserts itself gently nonetheless. Who is there, with you, the reader, watching it all, reliving it all, for doesn't the narrative depend upon an act of writing, a retelling?

I like the way that voice seems to withdraw back from the story, seems to be much more than a frame. The voice seems to speak from a voice deeper than any reported one in what follows. It becomes an echo chamber, a space of resonance, having hollowed out an unexpected interiority because of the power - a controlled power, very measured, in Naipaul's case - to tell.

But an interiority that is not quite a soul, not a private recess set back from the world. A kind of membrane instead, infinitely delicate. A membrance between inside and outside, and that, as it quivers, speaks of what we do not ordinarily call personality but should - the way the world registers with us. The way it affects us individually, absolutely alone.

This is what gives itself as style. This is what can make a voice, reading a voice, hearing it as you read, absolutely essential. I think of the Richard Ford trilogy, for all its uncertainties (the weak satire in the third volume, the overlong second volume), and, in particular, of The Sportswriter. That voice, that voice, what I wouldn't do to feel close to it again, Frank Bascombe's voice, that membrane between the world and himself that gives itself as style.

Naipaul's narrator is cooler, more distant. I do not feel an immediate love for this voice, and wonder whether it will come. It reminds of Radio 4, of the calm voice of the radio announcer. A calmness not on the side of style, but of a studied neutrality - the stylelessness of a ruling class, of an unchallenged middle class. Certain, self-certain, but so certain it does not need to draw attention to itself. It simply is what it is, calm and unruffled.

Brown prose, I think it's called sometimes. Measured prose. The prose of rulers, resounding with the voice of rulers. Will I finish Naipaul's book? It cost eight pounds, so I will make sure to. Eight pounds! From Waterstones! And this for a paperback whose glue does not hold its page batches to the back cover! But it is not an essential book. Its calm, calm voice is not necessary.

Now, fool, I say to myself. Now - what makes Richard Ford so different? The Sportswriter? Because that space of resonance, that stretched eardrum has a kind of density, I reply, a thickness. It has been infested with itself - it is thick. It has style - or has accrued style to itself, attracted it like a fly to stick flypaper. This is not the style of a ruler-writer. It is in lieu of itself, it looks for itself, as Frank Bascombe lives in search of - what?

I read the three Bascombe volumes after one another. What happiness! I miss them. I miss that thickened voice, looking for itself in the narrative. Looking without knowing what was to happen, what must happen. It knew nothing of plot. What happened - happened. The interminable house-selling episodes in the third volume. The interminable drive in the second. Ah but what happiness in the last chapter of The Sportswriter - a miracle, when the narrator catches a train on a whim to 'Gotham'. A miracle, because here the plot, in its detour, thickens as wonderfully as the prose. Chance, contigency here doubles the contingency of style, style's adventure, as it accretes itself in darkness and silence.

What are you on about, idiot?, I ask myself. What are you trying to find? Sunday morning. The wet yard. Flowers in pots, there for one season only. And a flowering plant - bright light purple. And the trimmed down Hebes. And the big tubs bought for salad, new sprouts poking up. The wet concrete. The bench my sister painted 6 years ago that needs painting again, detritus beneath it in piles beneath the gaps between slats above. A day like any other.

I was reading in the other room. Reading on the bed, as I never do when my Beloved is around. But she's not here and nor is that measure of reality she brings. Am I becoming 'dreamy' as Bascombe says happens to him? Dreamy ... a membrane stretched out like a hammock. A living style, that does not know itself. An idiom that thickens into life. To read is also to write, isn't it? To be written in some way? To find oneself written?

The Boiling Earth

Finishing William Golding's The Spire, I felt the same way as I had done at the end of Muriel Spark's The Hothouse on the East River: a need to read about the book and about Golding if only to contain what I had read, to contextualise it. Above all, I couldn't allow the book its distance, the distance it seems to take from itself in itself such that I was never quite sure what was happening, or rather that what was happening was (in the world of the book) really happening; Dean Jocelin, with whom the narrator sticks, seemed untrustworthy - or was it that he had entrusted himself to something else, manifest as a kind of madness. That he was entrusted to a rambling, coagulating madness that had thickened itself into the narrative.

Either way, I never felt on solid ground with the novel. I even put it away for a few days, returning to it last night after a long evening of computer games because I could think of nothing better to do. It had been waiting for me. It held me once again at its own distance. I read but I wasn't sure what I was reading. It seemed vague somehow - not wispy or cloudy but somehow blocky. It seemed too heavy for a book, or that its features had emerged as those of the Sphinx from some heavier, non-readable material.

What had happened in the book? I wasn't sure. I googled 'William Golding The Spire' for study notes to help me. What had happened? I lacked the distance. No: I lacked my distance by which I could hold what I read apart from me. I was struck to its surface like a fly ... Little to say about the book itself, though. Itself: as if it wasn't too heavy for commentary. As though it were not already lost in itself, falling into itself, a book like the spire and cathedral it describes unable to sit squarely on the restless earth. A book beneath which a kind of abyss opens, an anti-spire, the stirring of the earth 'like porridge coming to boil in a pot' which means everything, therefore is as unsure as the visitations Dean Jocelin receives.

Plot and character are like those visitations, those angels and devils which may only be the way Dean Jocelin's spinal tuberculosis manifests itself - pain and pain's alleviation, as if the novel were only made from that: pain and pain's alleviation, the possibility and impossibility of writing overlapped. It was almost impossible to read. I had to force my way through it. Even now, looking back, I wonder, what was it about?, and this after reading the study notes. Really, I have nothing to say about it. Relief that it is over. And a kind of wonder at this anti-spire of a book.

But I must have more Golding - immediately. I need to read everything if only to have done with it. I need to know of what this book is part - what movement. Madness - but not a private madness. Not the malaise of one character. A kind of existence-madness, being gone mad, the boiling earth ... and this as the law of writing to which the book corresponds. A madness that has come from some strange law of writing, where language takes a weird detour into itself, becomes thick, clots up the veins of sense. 

A Secret Collision

India continues to collide with Southern Asia, I read; the Himalayas are still being forced upwards and their folded roots downwards; the earth's crust thickens there where two tectonic plates are forced against one another. And now I remind myself of those collisions in life that have not ceased - of the secret movement that complicates the surface of the body, that keeps inside and outside apart, into a soul. The soul, I tell myself is made, not given, and as a complication, a folding where inside and outside are lost each inside the other.

When I try to select a novel to buy in a bookshop, it is for evidence of this strange origami that I look. I want to read of the folding of a life, its secret blossoming, not outwards to the sun, but inwards to that dark recess that loses itself in itself. To a find a prose that speaks of an involution, an event that has continued to happen as one plate rams against the other, lifting and deepening itself into thickness.

And what kind of prose? One that not only reports the event in question, but speaks from it and is nothing apart from it. That finds its origin in that same confusion that opens the dimension of what is too quickly called interiority. And that redoubles the origin in the surprise of its own birth, so that to write of the event is to re-enact it again, to let it bloom into a narrative.

How to reach what folded the soul into itself? I don't think it can be reached. It hides itself, there on the other side of the narrative. It was lost straightaway, as soon as you began to write, but also as soon as you began to live - as soon as a soul opened as the locus of life, a place that was yours. All narratives are detours, I tell myself; writing is always on the way to an Origin it cannot reach.

In this sense, all plots are arbitrary. When I find the novel on the bookshelf, I want the sense from it that all plots are arbitrary, and what matters is to begin, to set out. To begin writing and then to follow through this beginning, being loyal to it, letting the narrative reverberate with the Origin it cannot reach. I want to know that it is no plot that matters, but another kind of intrigue, in which Writing has been caught by Writing; in which the Origin is allowed to speak in what is only the beginning of a story, an arbitrary story.

That is why I welcomed Nooteboom's The Following Story when I found it a few months ago, saving it for a long journey when I could read it all in one go. On the opening page, a mystery - what was it? a Dutchman awakens in the Portugal he visited many years ago. Last night, he fell asleep in Amsterdam (was that it?), and this morning he is in Portugal in another body, another life, such as has become familiar from David Lynch's recent films. I think I could tell at once this was an arbitary way of beginning, a way for Noteboom to engage the Origin. It gave the appearance of a plot, it set a narrative on the way, and that is all.

I can't remember much of the story because I lost the book almost as soon as I read it (this happened before with Sebald's Vertigo). Perhaps it is still in the Lost and Found in Chicago O'Hare. I remember a few barely sketched characters, figures from the narrator's life. I remember long, very boring passages, particularly in the second half of the story. And I remember discovering that everyone in the novel was dead, or the narrator was, and that the incident with which it began dissolved in this greater mystery. The narrator was dead and being rowed across the river familiar from Greek mythology - was that it?

In a sense, the story did not matter. In another sense, only the story could matter; a plot - the semblance of a plot - was necessary for something to get underway ... and it had to be sporadically absorbing, even - had to give some measure of narrative suspense in order to keep moving (a suspense which, for me, INLAND EMPIRE lacked, and was certainly absent from Kis' Hourglass, which I tried to read more recently). But that it kept moving was the thing, or it kept track of that secret movement that meant Nooteboom had to write and has, each time, to hang his writing on a plot only to dissolve that plot entirely. A plot indifferent to itself, that is somehow in lieu of itself, a novel that writes and erases what is written even as it is written. A novel whose pages are as though blank or that let that blankness shine through....

Fever Dreams

Casual notes in response to Waggish, who responds to an earlier post of mine (and which was, in turn a response to an earlier post of his).

Wolfe was an engineer, being said to have played a part in developing the machinery that makes Pringles crisps, and he brings an engineer's delight to the creation of some of his literary worlds. It's our delight too, say in 'The Death of Doctor Island' - a story I haven't read for many years (and I don't have a copy of the collection from which it comes): a sick boy on a false moon - does it orbit Jupiter? - what we take to be his fever dreams are, the literary engineer shows us, made of tiltings of his moon's orbit.

Was that right? Do I remember correctly? The engineering was marvellous - but the fever dream of the story was more so. Like the many-sailed spaceship Wolfe lets us explore in The Urth of the New Sun, I was distantly comforted to know the story was science-fiction and not fantasy. Real laws applied; something of John W. Campbell remained in Wolfe: hard SF remained at its core: hard SF, only Wolfe had dragged a white hole into its dimming sun. But beyond the hard SF, something more - I read Wolfe when I was much younger; I was young enough to have still the attitude of the writer Mumpsimus persuasively corrects in this post, and young enough never to have met any kind of religious person.

That Wolfe was a Catholic (converting before his marriage) - this was wonderful. That he believed (as he said once of the Soldier series, still incomplete) that the gods of the Greeks were real and walked among them meant that he was more than an engineer - that outside the artifice of his world-making, there was the reality of God the Outsider. The fever-dream of God! Wolfe was a fantasist before he was a engineer, but unlike the Catholic novelists I'd also read - Greene, say or the later Waugh, his Catholicism did not saturate the plot and incidents of his fiction. He was engineer as well as a fantasist - there was not a tension between them, not really; I think God the Outsider always remains for him the real agent of creation. Literary creation for Wolfe is only ever idolatry. A fun idolatry, though; a happy artificing - if it is not innocent, it is not wicked either.

But doesn't this prevent his fiction from bearing upon another sense of the Outside - not the real world as a referent, as the source of literary representations, but the reserve the world hides by seeming all too real? Does literature - beyond any notion of the 'literary establishment' Mumpsimus places within quotation marks (and beyond Establishment Literary Fiction) - bear upon a kind of truth, of a correspondence between word and referent? A correspondence, rather, with what the world is not - or that nothingness (is that the word?) that inhabits the world as reserve; that means it might become other than it is.

To read is to free the world in some quiet way. To free it from what it is, and to set free, as reading, what you are, too, who might otherwise commit that idolatry that takes our consensual world to be all it might be. For this reason, Steve's remarks on McEwan's Saturday are forever justified: the conventional book answers to the world of convention; it confirms even that non-reality that Bush: confirms the new world being made and remade around us, this world of lies and cyncism. And so literature really can take an axe to the frozen sea inside us, and the frozen sea that is the world.

Is it worth noting, in this context the right wing sympathies of Wolfe's Operation Ares? And if Wolfe really is a man of the right (too quick? too simplistic? and doesn't he think Operation Ares a bad book?), and is this why he is content to make genre artifices rather than what might be called literature (as Steve's This Space is the guardian of this word)? Or is it because God is his fever dream, God who would have the monopoly on all true creation and compared to whom Wolfe is another storyteller beside the campfire that is the sun? I am happy to dream with Wolfe, but I feel uneasy when I wake. And isn't this what I want from reading - to wake up? 

Literature and Artifice

I like Waggish's comments on Gene Wolfe's work - I admit, however, that I find his prose entrancing; I've reread The Book of the New Sun twice not only because I love Severian's picaresque adventures, and thinking about the riddles Wolfe seems to set us, but because of those winding sentences - because I love the narrator's voice. Is it right to point out that the games of the unreliable narrator are just games - that there is no reason why we are prevented from assessing the truth of what is told us?

This is what Waggish finds frustrating, and says has separated Wolfe from other genre writers who have won mainstream literary acclaim. At one point, I remember, Severian, the narrator, tells us he knows he is mad; I underlined the sentence as I read it; I thought: this is important; something will be made of this. But the end, nothing was; the fiction remains untouched by madness - how different, then, to Priest's The Affirmation (see Mumpsimus's remarks) which, like The Book of the New Sun, I have read three times in all.

I've always found Wolfe's preface to Endangered Species (a much weaker collection than The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories, as most of his later books are weak) disingenuous: his stories are just stories told around the campfire that is the sun. As Peter Wright's thorough Attending Daedelus shows (scroll down the comments for a summary) I think quite convincingly, The Book of the New Sun and its sequel are about artifice, about fabrication. Even the hierodules are idolators, false angels imitating the Creation without being themselves creators. It takes Patera Silk of The Book of the Long Sun to come into contact with the one genuinely Outside. Severian never reaches the one called the Outsider - or not that I remember. Silk does - albeit in a series far weaker than the New Sun (I've never read my way through to the Short Sun books).

The Outsider, of course, is God. God beyond games, beyond the idolatry of Pas (of Typhon). And now I ask myself about Steve's comments on the relationship between literature and genre, wondering whether genre is content to remain fictional; to construct a world, to dwell with its characters in it; for event to succeed event in a rich linearity.

There is nothing wrong with this - of course not. But there is another kind of writing - and what Steve calls literature refers for those books for whom The Outsider is not God. For whom, then, fiction gives onto the unencompassable Outside as it names language, as it names the world. 'All works form a genre in coming into existence', says Steve. They form a body; they take on plot and character; they offer themselves to be read. But 'resistance to genre marks the literary': then plotting and characterisation must themselves be at stake in the fictional work. Then fiction, artifice must be shown for what they are. The writer is an idolator, not because there is a God, or that God could name the Outside. The writer is an idolator because of that Outside, which admits only of idolatry, that will not allow for any other means of approach.

Is this what Wolfe tells us in The Urth of the New Sun, when it becomes clear that the hierodules, whose name means temple slaves, are mere artificers, following an evolutionary imperative? Is it that there is only idolatry, sham creation? Or is there a way in which the Outside can speak itself via the same artificing - that it breaks the surface of the novel, as when we understand in The Affirmation that the fiction is only idolatry, even as it is the only way to bring the Outside to speech? A resistance to genre - I wonder if Urth, otherwise so unsatisfactory, rises to this when the hierodules are revealed to be botched makers like ourselves, not gods, as Wright's innovative and ingenious reading shows us? In the end, however, I think Waggish is right (see also his comparison between Priest to Wolfe in this earlier post): Severian may be a liar, he may be mad, but the book itself is terribly sane, remaining but a particularly lovely artifice among other idolatrous artifices.

The Prose-Cyclist

You speak; you've made a dent in the streaming of language. Speak - and you've made a stand in speech, although it is by means of speech that you've made this stand. But what kind of stand is this?

The 8 year old Thomas Bernhard is cycling, and cycling as far and as fast as he can. His bicycle belongs to his guardian, but he has reclaimed it as his own, painting it silver and cycling around the countryside. Today he has resolved to visit his Aunt in Salzburg, 22 miles away. It's a long trip; how can a child cycle this far, and on his own? But as little Bernhard does so, it is with the dream of joining the cycling elite, even though he's too small to reach the pedals while he is sitting on the saddle.

The 8 year old knows his trip is forbidden, that he might be punished, but he thinks his audacity will be so admired it will annul his offence. One of his stockings is torn and covered with oil; he grows weary, and the road seems to become ever longer. Then - disaster - his bicycle chain breaks, and he tumbles into a ditch. It's dark, and there are 7 or 8 miles to go, his bike is ruined and his clothes are torn ...

So with Bernhard's narration of his cycling trip. The trip is also a trip in prose; the maelstrom of the prose is the maelstrom of language; Bernhard writes against the wind, against style in the effort of the prose, its forward movement as it gathers everything up in its momentum. Controlled madness, held together at the brink of falling apart, the great loops of the sentences rolling forward. Discord, disequilibrium: style strains language all the way to the point of breaking (but it does not break).

Bernhard, prose-cyclist: think of him as he first begins to write, as he finds the strength to continue. Think of him writing before he shows his work in progress to his lifeperson, who tells him whether to discard the piece or continue. He begins again; his narrator is much like the narrators in all his books. He begins, and each book is pretty similar to the other.

But the strength to begin again, to see through a book! The strength to hold it together, to write through the days and nights! To let himself be caught and borne up the rhythms of language! And in the breaks of that rhythm, like the hard carapace of a lobster cracked open: the meat of language in its density, its thickness. Language in its black, glistening darkness, there before any story, before anyone could say 'I'.

There are no autobiographies. Or none that can reach back into the black blood that surges before the beginning. Impersonal language, like a sea of oil. Language whose waves must part before anyone can say 'I'. No autobiographies. For how might you write of your birth into language?

What did Bernhard discover when he wrote Frost (or when his first story was published, or his first poem)? Language open to enclose him. As though he had struggled back up the stream; he found his way to the head of the waters, to the rivers rising on the mountains where there were no speakers yet. To write - isn't to come under the spell of the origin? To travel back through language until there was no speaker yet. Or is it to travel forward, when language breaks like black oil upon no shore?

And once you have begun to write there is no end, just as there is no end to speech. One book, another. One and then another, all the way up to the end. Newfoundland: wasn't that to be the last book, the last feast, when language breaks open its carapace? When it reveals itself as only black oil, black blood, black meat?

Forgetting Narrative

Something new happens, James Wood says, with Chekhov and his characters; he bestows them a freedom - 'they act like free consciousnesses, and not as owned literary characters'. Chekhov discovers what would come to be called the stream of consciousness, which allows, says Wood, for a kind of forgetfulness to enter fiction.

A stream of consciousness? Perhaps a river instead, and downstream when it rolls along, braiding, meandering, and perhaps isolating itself in those still pools whose stagnancy recalls that stultifying rural Russia Chekhov evokes so well. Chekhov's 'beautifully accidental style, his mimicking of the stream of the mind, is that it allows forgetfulness into fiction'.

A forgetting, a braiding of thoughts, a meandering away from intention, from purpose - and this is what Chekhov allows: the characters, while not forgetting to be themselves 'They forget to act as purposeful fictional characters. They mislay their scripts'.

Woolf follows Chekhov and perfects the art. Forgetting, with Woolf, becomes a kind of absentmindedness:

A character is allowed to drift out of relevance, to wander into a randomness which may be at odds with the structure of the novel as a whole. What does it mean for a character to become irrelevant to a novel? It frees characters from the fiction which grips them; it lets character forget, as it were, that they are thickened in a novel.

Characters freed, then, from the iron collar of narrative. Characters set free to wander, but to do more than run away with their author, surprising him by their vividness, by the life they seem to want to live. To do more - for they've forgotten they're in a narrative at all; the book falls away in irrelevance.

So with Mrs Ramsay, who forgets for 20 pages she's to be at the centre of Lily Briscoe's painting in To the Lighthouse. Forgets, and bears the reader along with her for those 20 pages. We travel with her; we experience forgetting with her, Wood says; 'and in this way out of her'. Out of her? Of Mrs Ramsay? Is it still Mrs Ramsay's stream of consciousness that rolls through those pages?

It is as if the novel forgets itself, forgets that Mrs Ramsay is a character. She has been at the centre of the novel all along and we have hardly notced it, because we have inhabited her own invisibility.

Into what are we drawn as readers? Into the self-forgetting of the novel, that sets free its central characters and all of its characters, that sets free its plot and lets wander; and finally sets free its narrative voice, that speaks only in the invisibility Mrs Ramsay has been allowed to inhabit. As though her thoughts had turned her inside out like a glove. As though there was a kind of streaming that is more than consciousness - a current that has drawn us drowning beneath the water.

Wood does not go so far.

Yet Woolf's delicate method shows us that we are never thinking about nothing, that we are always thinking about something, that it is impossible for us not to think, even if the thought is merely the process of forgetting something.

Thought is intentional, as the phenomenologist would say; we cannot help but think of things; thought thinks thoughts, and to forget, as Descartes would admit, is to continue to think. Is it this that To the Lighthouse shows? For Wood, 'it brings us closer to what Woolf called "life". In her novels, thought radiates outward, as a medieval town radiates outward - from a beautifully neglected centre'. 

This is beautiful. Thought radiates outward. Thought laps outward, but from what centre? From that, now, that displaces character, narrative, and the fiction itself. And by so doing, perhaps allows another voice to come forward, murmuring, rustling, concerned with itself and turning in itself. This is the voice that speaks invisibly in the novel's visibilities; it is what turns into darkness even as the surface of the stream seems to dissolve into light. But in its darkness, isn't also what allows light? And is its plunge from the surface what allows its glitter?

Perhaps there is a thinking that is more than intentional, or that runs backwards from the intended object to the would-be thinker. A thought that is more than can be thought, that splits consciousness wide and lets there run a stream of non-consciousness, the stream that rustles darkly in itself, whose laughter is like that of Odradek and, says Janouch, Kafka: the sound of dead leaves. Might we call it life, too? Might it also be called life, that impersonal current that neglects itself in any narrative, and that neglects us too, so that we continually miss it?

As I Lay Dying is a great book because Faulkner, like Joyce and Woolf (and presaged by Chekhov) uses the innovation of stream of consciousness to allow his characters to forget themselves, to break free of the author's incessant memoranda, to be in their own verbal confusions.

This from Wood later in the volume and it seems almost a retreat. For it is the novel itself that is forgotten with Woolf (with Wood's Woolf) - that forgets itself as the narrative voice that drifts through Mrs Ramsay, the other characters, and the plot itself. Perhaps it can be presented as a thought, or as a kind of thinking - only one, now, that is greater than the thinker, like Descartes' idea of God. Greater, and found first of all, there among the contents of the thinker's consciousness. There first of all, that point which, I imagine, might be pulled upon so that consciousness itself turns inside out like a glove.

Dream of that book where thought thinks itself outside the thinker. Dream of a narrative voice uncontained by the narrative, of a forgetting that draws it back into the novel, back, even as it is nothing but its flowing surface. After the stream of consciousness comes, with Blanchot, another innovation: the streaming of that impersonal voice of which consciousness is itself a fold. Isn't this what he sought to discover from the 1930s onwards in his fiction, his literary criticism?

Assertions here, not arguments. I will return to this topic on another occasion.

Inwardness

I've lost my taste for the major bookshops that sell new or second books, for the shops to which anyone can go and in which you might run into into someone you know, who has become, just like you, no one in particular, a customer or a client and whom, when you meet him, coalesces from this no one without however leaving him behind, like a waking up still thick with the enchanted world of dreams. And I've given up heading straight for such bookshops, as though they were destinations in themselves as opposed to how I like them to be now: surprises unlooked-for and unanticipated, half-forgotten places that it suddenly occurs to me to visit, as on a whim - that when I have a little slack time I might wander there just to look, but browsing idly, carelessly and without a thought for what I might find, looking for nothing, and then leaving behind those books I might want to buy and forgetting them almost at once; saying to myself: too heavy to cart around, or another time, or I've got too many books.

But yesterday I found, nonetheless, two volumes of Canetti's autobiography in a large format paperback, and a bilingual volume of German poetry edited and translated by Michael Hamburger, who's just died, and whom Sebald (or the narrator in The Rings of Saturn) remembers visiting in his messy house. Reading Trakl on the underground, it was as though I'd popped my eyes out into something soothing: they felt cooled as soon as I read the name 'Elis' and of the blues and purples of which that poet likes to write. And I found myself, reading Brecht, wishing I'd brought that big bilingual book of his poems I saw a few years ago. There was a poem by Handke, too, from a collection that has been translated, I notice: I should hunt that down, too.

These books bought in a slack hour, when I thought I'd let an hour open up like a sail to be blown along up the street that opens off the high street. A modest shop in a suburb, and the more welcome for that. I hesitated over two hardbacked Naipauls - should I, shouldn't I; and over a handsome In Patagonia for £6 - too heavy, I thought, what with everything else, and it took an age to decide on the volume of poetry, marked at £9.95 - would I read it? did I want it now only because I would have wanted it years ago? - nothing worse than a book unread on a shelf, stranded there, a book unread and therefore alone, washed up from some great shipwreck of culture and to my bookshelf - unlikely place - mine, on the other side of that sure and certain kingdom of taste and cultivation to which it once belonged.

Books because I have them must be lost, I think to myself. I live on the other side of the collapse, I think, and that I have this or that volume is testament to the great breakup, the shattered arctic ice sheet that sets icebergs wandering off. They could only have found me as shipwrack, I think, and I look through bookshops like a beachcomber. But then, happily, I opened the Hamburger edition and bathed my eyes in Trakl, and read again a few poems by Celan, and surprised myself with Rilke and hollowed out an 'intense inwardness' at King's Cross station, waiting under the timetables for my train to be announced. Inwardness, Innigkeit, where I was first of all the rebound of my reading, that space of resonance where the poem looked beyond me for its reader and thereby held itself open, maintaining the opening that it essentially was. And holding me likewise open, inwardness opening outward, and the names Rilke and Trakl indices of a hope that let eternity flash across my landscape.

Rilke, Trakl, and perhaps Hamburger too - and Sebald: names that owed themselves entirely to poetry, stones smoothed by the waters perfectly round.