Spurious

The Still Point

Does it matter what story Handke tells? Crossing the Sierra des Gredos has familiar elements - a walk to an airport (Across), the protagonist's enemies (Repetition, and all the others), the salvific power of the image (No-Man's Bay) ... but does it matter? There are books you read for the power of telling, rather than what is told, as though this power were a wave that gathered everything up and brought it back to you; as though that wave was already gathering itself there behind you, there years ago, in the German original (published in 2002), in the other books by Handke it recalls (the first published in 1966) - as that wave that began as the universe began and that retakes it all now, giving everything again.

That voice, that power of narrative: how is it that Handke sets his stories into the order of things, into the movement of stars or the arms of galaxies, in the great wheeling of the milky way as it trails stars through our night sky? There's a kind of patience to his telling. The strength of patience, the strength of time as it turns the seasons. As though the book had found Eliot's 'still point of the turning world' - that pole around which everything revolves.

How hard it is to explain! And what's the point! Read! Be read! The still point of time is looking for you. The power of telling wants to install itself at the still point of your life. What does it mean to read thus? To be read? To be the black hole at the centre of a galaxy, and around which it turns in its entirety?

I'm familiar with everything in Handke's book; he's told it before. A character almost at the same as the others. A traveller, a contemplator, a searcher for images. With enemies like his other characters. Who converses with a narrator like the chemist of One Dark Night ... who breaks from an old life like The Left-Handed Woman (the photograph above, at the top of this page bears this title). The same, the same and that is where Handke waits for us, at the still point from which the same is turning. In the kingdom of reccurrence.

The Last Pagan

A writer develops a 'metaphysic', a system of recognisable motifs, of themes, of relations. A development insinuated in creative work, that permeates what is written, and in a manner at first unnoticeable. The writer does not ask, who have I become? but accepts the changes that cross his writing like light across ice; this is the bounty of writing, it is how writing, like our handwriting, is complexified with age, with experience.

Old rhythms set themselves in motion as they are touched by new ones, and the whole is changed each time, with each book. The whole is changed: motifs, themes, relations retaken freshly: this is the life of an oeuvre, of the climate of a writing. A climate that deepens, becomes richer and greater - that has travelled a greater internal distance, that rises into itself like a stormcloud, and generating internal potencies that must discharge themselves in lightning.

Sometimes it can seem to break away from easy readibility, so that a newcomer may remain disorientated and unseduced: style encountered as mannerism, as pretension. But that style was earned - it sought itself; it came to itself through an immense distance; it enfolds such greatness, such vastness that whatever its disappointments - the bloatedness of No Man's Bay, the whimsy of One Night  - these are still complexly folded works of middle age, of the middle of life.

What must it have been to have written every day? Every day - and with Handke to have known, each day, the measure of time, its gift - the steady brightness beneath which he formed his books. Across already exhibits a 'late style', I've decided this morning. Repetition still looks like a novel, but Across? A plot without tension, without resolution. This book occupies a plateau, a great threshold. At every moment, open. What must it have been to have risen each morning to keep that opening open, and to have been kept by that opening as between two hands in prayer? (The Afternoon of the Writer is one answer).

It is as though every novel he would write begins at that place where the plateau opens, a point that normally closes, rather than begins a work of art - think, for example, of the last thirty pages of Lawrence's St. Mawr, and the long denouement (is that the word?) of Herzog's Heart of Glass. It's true, plot seems to lose itself - or it is gathered, at each moment, to the threshold where anything at all could happen. At once, open - but also fated, living the measure according to a kind of justice.

No Man's Bay would be an epic; the chemist of One Night reads tales of knights and chivalry, which the narrative parodies; Loser, of Across, reads Virgil. Don Juan, still untranslated, will presumably renew the story of the old seducer: each time, an older European form is brought to our new Europe. Or is it that the older form is brought to exhaustion by this worn out Europe, this Europe at the edge of its disappearance into economism? Disappears - and what is left but what Handke allows a narrator to call 'the evil of the every day' which must be retraversed in order to recover its hidden bounty.

I think of Handke as a pagan writer, as a Greek, as a Latin: I think he has that resource, a kind of pressure, that reaches him from ancient books. A pagan, whose pages turn in the wind and are read by the sky, as though they were abandoned books, similar to the haiku the travelling poets of Japan used to leave at stages on their journeys. Abandoned, because there are no other poets to read them. Lost in the expanses of Old Europe - lost as Old Europe is lost in this worn out continent, that capital buys and sells to itself.

A pagan - and then as one who is not lost, despite everything; whose narrators have behind them the wind from old Europe, the Greeks, the Latins - but I would not say the prophets, I would not say Judaism belongs to his writing. I'm not sure what I mean by this, but I remember Levinas's anti-mystical Judaism, that allowed his to celebrate Gagarin's ascent as the beginning of the disappearance of sacred places, of the pagan.

But then, for Levinas, Greek is the language of Europe into which the septaugint must be continually translated. Greek is rationality and order; Greek is philosophy, Europe's language. But with Handke, there is another Greek, and a Latin linked to that Greek. Isn't there something of Heidegger in this novelist? But let me brush these ill-formed thoughts away, except to note that there is a way of living the end of Europe that is no longer Greek, or Latin - no longer pagan, perhaps, and yet that still does not accede to the triumph of capital.

Callers to Order

Listening to 'Great Waves' by the Dirty Three featuring Chan Marshall is like bathing my face in fresh water. I wake up, my attention returns from the thickets where it's caught, and the room seems to open out around me. There are a few songs that are like this, callers to attention, and I use them sparingly. They come to my aid, and I know they watch over me, waiting in reserve.

And yet I also know they watch from me, out of me, that it is also my eyes with which they see. It is as though they needed me, these waiting songs, in order to happen to themselves. Do horses like being ridden? Pointless question. One day, the horse cannot distinguish its freedom from its rider's. When, otherwise, might it go out for a gallop? And does a song like being heard? 'Gentle Waves', I tell myself, is nothing without me. It lies on my hard disk like a leaf.

Callers to order: Handke's phrase, or the phrase he allows his narrator, in Across, the book I would like to say is his purest. What happens? Read critical works, and they'll tell you there was a murder. It's true, of course: the narrator happens on a man scrawling a swastika into a tree. He kills him with one blow and throws him over a cliff.

But that murder is like the one Handke allows his narrator to imagine in On a Dark Night, who longs to topple cyclists from their mountain bikes: it is part of an order of things, an order of walking, of the natural world, of meditative noticing.

Gloriously Handkean; he needs, one presumes, to revive this sense of order every time he writes. He needs to be called to order. But then Loser, of Across, is called away from his work by those callers (what are they? certain objects - archeological remnants).

I still await the first daddy long legs of the summer, remembering how Loser calls them creatures of the threshold. And Across, the whole book, which I have not reread and do not have near me, but that lives on in me, inhabiting me, is all threshold, all plateau: the book between, the book steered gently by the same wind that ruffles the pages of all Handke's fiction. The wind at the back of the walker, the wanderer, who has as his enemy the cyclist and the fascist.

The Translator

There are moments that do not pass, that lose their bearings. Lost moments that ask to be abandoned to the past, to fall back into time, and the streaming of time. The inconsequential: why should I remember walking from Holborn to the London Review Bookshop? Why do I remember crossing that road by the scooter shop?

I was on the way to the bookshop, true, but I can locate that moment only by way of the bookshop; in truth, the moment was indifferent to my destination, and to my point of origin. It detached itself; it was lifted from the course of time. How was I to live what would not settle? The moment passed - how could it do otherwise? - but it did not pass.

How is it that when I remember it, it is only by way of what occludes it? In truth, I am unequal to the moment; I who always know what to do next am unfit for a moment that admits no 'next'. Now I understand why Peter Handke's books are growing larger and larger: he would write of the moment without succession, not to catch it, but to allow it to fall back into time.

But what time? The epic - a new kind of epic, the great recounting of the insignificant everyday, which fills our lives, even by vacating our lives of content. The insignificant? No: the infinitely significant, the moment which promises everything, that clothes itself in every event in the world. Handke, writing of the day to day, steers the moment into a succession of diaphonous moments.

It is not continuity he seeks (his novels have purged themselves of plot, of character, of incident), or suspense - unless it is to suspend one course of time in favour of another. The epic of moments, of the momentary everyday: how is it I know he has no words of his own, and not even a name? How is it I think of him as the translator, as the one who lets speak the moment without fixing it in any particular language?

After the Book

I've passed through its seasons and its climates, passed through its speeds and its slownesses, passed through the slow pages of the end when the narrative broadened like a great river - broadened, and flowed more slowly as the whole of what had gone before gathered mightily behind it. Slow river of the end, passing through everything and nothing; slow river of the day to day: there was no detail too small to be passed over; nothing that could not be borne by your great streaming.

What happened? Nothing happened; it was the story of the narrator's days, those only. What happened? The narrator wrote of his days; he became the chronicler of days. And what was learnt by way of this chronicling? As reader, I learnt of the pulse of time, the return, each day, of the beginning. I knew, with the passing of each paragraph, how his days turned, the narrator of the no man's bay. And I knew how my days turned in the reading of the book.

It is true, I struggled with these pages; I fell behind them; I thought: there is nothing to make me read further, and even though I want to read slowly, I am not as slow as this chronicle asks me to be, and how can anyone be that slow? I even resented the chronicle and its slownesses, saying to myself: the narrator has too much time and too many luxuries - how can I sympathise with him, he who already has a house, who is able to walk out in the world each morning; what has he to do with me and the world I live in? What does he know of administration and bureaucracy? What does he know of red-tape and resentment?

He is a man of leisure and he writes for men of leisure; his is the luxury of time without projects and without tasks. As chronicler, he sets down what happens in non-time, of his passage through the day. The rest of us do not pass; we cannot. For the rest of us, there is no passage. For the rest of us in our offices, the day is a series of obstacles and frustrations. What need have I of his Olympianism? What need have I to learn of a day which is not mine and cannot be mine?

Or is it for this reason his chronicle should be read? Is it because he passes through that which I cannot pass that I must read him? And it is true that my reading engendered a kind of writing. It's true that by reading I learnt to write of a time beneath time, of truancy and unemployment, my favourite themes. Yes, perhaps this is what I was taught: to write a chronicle like the one I was reading.

But this is what I already knew - why else would I be chronicling my reading here, at the blog? Perhaps it was that I was taught anew what it was to write of the day, and the passing of days. Wasn't this the reason why I picked this book, by this author? Wasn't this why I ordered it from the USA and awaited its arrival from the USA? I knew it would watch over my writing. I knew, by my reading that my writing would be watched over.

Yes, it was that which I wanted: for the book to accompany me in every line that I wrote. To be accompanied - isn't this a way of overcoming the loneliness of writing? To write is to do so before readers have come, even as I am one of those readers. They are to come; they belong to the future, but I do not yet know their proximity. But to write as I read, after I have come, as a reader, to a book that waited for me, is to write with, not alone. Or it is to write as a forebear, as one who inherits and is seized by writing just as the broad river bears all things? This is where I am, at the edge of the delta. Here I am, at the delta's edge as the river broadens to become as wide as the sea.

Book, you have fallen behind me. Or is it, book, that you burn on the river like a funeral barge? Ashes are scattered across the water; so too are your ashes scattered. Reading's beginning and reading's end - all this is carried by writing; all this does the river carry in suspension. That is what it means to write with the whole of one's life. In truth, mourning is with us always; there is not a day without it, and when death comes, it will already have been announced by a thousand other deaths. Finishing this book, I will have known death again, but by the detour of writing, I will know life.

Page 420

Why is it I have come to read more and more slowly? Why, having passed through spring, summer and autumn of the book, do I pass so slowly through winter? Because when we part ways I will part from myself; because the end of the book is the end of the steering of the book, the stars it placed in the sky above me. I would rather have them, the stars, than nothing. By your strong prose was I borne. By the turning of full pages was I carried. I will read more slowly, as I come to the end.

Why did it only occur to me yesterday to check the date of publication? 1993. The book was written in 1993, and not in the 1999 in which it was set. 1993, and not the time of civil war and the breakdown of Europe of its 1999. As in his last book, the writer had written a fantasy; he felt it necessary to remove the book from the present and set it elsewhere. And 1999 is not any time; it is the turning of the millennium, the brink of the old and the beginning of the new. The beginning, perhaps, of the transformation of which the narrator tells us on the first extraordinary pages of the book he will relate.

Doesn't he always promise to narrate transformation, this author? And isn't it always that the book is perpetually held at that moment, at the threshold of transformation? This is why the blurb on the back of his books is always inaccurate. No one of his pages is more important than any other; the story always hovers at the turning point; it is held in transformation, the world is perpetually carried to the brink of itself.

I admit it, there were many boring pages. How difficult it was, around page 300, when, after the stories of the 7 wanderers, we were made to return to the narrator's own daily recounting, the chronicle of the minutiae of the 'no man's bay'! At that moment, I thought: the book is definitely not The Book; the author has slipped up - these are too many pages, and the narrative is like the river that runs into a swamp and is lost there.

How unbearable dull, these pages! And yet how many passages I marked with my pencil! How these passages grow in the memory! The bee's nest in the cliff face; the stagnant old pond; the narrator's noisy neighbours and the troops who pass everywhere; the paths that he names and the immigrant workers whom he greets; and finally, at the end, the restaurant of ladders where the narrator meets his son: I will return to them, these passages, and that will be how I will know the book, only in retrospect - only as it streams behind me, like the tail of a comet. Pain that I will only be carried backward by my memory, and not forward, in the forward sweep of reading! Pain that I will not know the innocence of going forward!

How many pages are there left? It is cold today and I am holed up in the flat, curtains drawn, gas fire on. How cold it is! The book is on the floor, with me. I sit at my desk, and the book is open, with a pencil along its centre, resting on the floor. And it is though, as it waits, that it projects a heaven above my small room and that it is the room's hearth.

My Year in No Man's Bay: by revealing the title, have I not betrayed the book? The Book, perhaps, but not this, its substitute. I can name it now, as I can name its author: Peter Handke and I am betraying nothing. When will it be 1999? When will it come, the turning of the millennium, the Book on whose pages I will read of the new world? 'How long did it take you to finish the book?' - 'A few weeks'. - 'How long did it take you?' - 'I read with my life, with the whole of my life'.

Page 250

The book is not the book. How could it be? At first, in the morning of reading, I read carefully, impassionedly. And when morning became noon? I thought: the book is strong as I too am strong. At page 90, I can leave it for a while. Page 90, and the book is the book and I am I, and we can be apart.

That was noon. And now? Many more pages have turned. I reached page 250 today. It's the afternoon of reading. But isn't it in the afternoon that reading loses itself? A sign of loss is to read more, to read intensely. Reading becomes voracious. But voracity is anxious, as if the hold of the book has loosened. I read quickly, intensively, but that is a sign of the failure of reading.

The book is not the book; that much is sure. When did it fail me - or did I fail it? Or was it another book I failed - the book behind this book? Yes, that book - the one my reading always sought and which I'd thought, this time, I'd found. I'd lost it, that book, and this book, the one I was reading, became a book on the way to the book, a book among others.

Have I failed the book? Did it fail me? Or have we both turned aside, disappointed in one another? It is there on my bed now. I am halfway through. Page 250. Halfway through, its spine cracked open, generous, my place in the close printed pages kept by a pencil. It is there, a book like other books, readable, finishable and in which I will not approach the book all books are hiding.

How, I ask myself, did its author let himself be carried away so! Why did he think he could write an epic, why a book of this length! Perhaps, I tell myself, the book will heal itself; perhaps it will come together. But I have read enough of this author to know no turn will occur. This is the way it will be.

The book runs on, but it does not bear me. It runs on, and I am not borne. Am I reader? No; I am a watcher; the book is a spectacle. It was the book of life, and now it is a book like any other. I am a spectator; it is not essential to me; I read to see how it will turn out; I read because I want to have finished the oeuvre of this particular author.

Now the book is attached to a name - failure. Now it is part of an oeuvre - failure. And who am I, the reader? The one thrown back on himself, refused - but called anew by a book beyond this book. What name will it take, the next time it is born? What name will it bear, this book, in its next incarnation?

The 90th Page

Reading, Not-Reading

It is true I do not want to disappoint the book; I am reading it slowly, and even reading other books when I think I am not quite able to attend to the first book. Yes, on my trip down to London, I took other books with me, in part because the first book was too large for my rucksack, and would weigh me down on my cycle trips through the parks of London, but also because I knew that a long train ride would give me too much time with the book.

Too much time: I would read too greedily; I would not pause when the book paused and rest when the book rested. I would not, in short, allow the book to bear me according to its own rhythm, which is to say, its own wisdom, in the time it allotted me for reading and for non-reading. I took another book to read on the train; I finished it quickly. It was done in four hours, in the four hours of my journey and I knew I had read it too quickly.

Fortunate that I didn't bring the first book! For that, too, would have been finished too quickly. Then, leaving London, I bought another book in a secondhand shop; it was by an author I had long wanted to read: Gombrowicz. Sarraute on the way down to London, and Gombrowicz on the way back up. I read half of Pornografia on the train. I was tired; sometimes I dozed. I coughed and sucked Tunes for my cough. I spilt tea across the table and on my jumper, but Gombrowicz was with me, and when I awoke from dozing, I read on.

This, too, was not reading. There must be a kind of strength for reading, a preparedness, and I knew, even though I was not rushing Gombrowicz, I was failing it by my tiredness. Was I reading closely enough? Was I sufficiently alert to remember what happened in early chapters to follow what was happening in later ones? My worry was that I would later have to read a summary of the book in order to understand what had happened. Betrayal: I would have missed the book I was reading. And what of the first book, which I was not reading? What of the book open in my flat, open, still at page 80?

Constellations

This morning, stuffy with cold, I began to read it in the early hours. What use was getting up? What use was writing? I would read instead, although Gombrowicz was only half read. I would return to the ur-book, to the first book whose coming was an advent I had awaited in the late summer and the autumn. It had come; I would not read too quickly, I said to myself, but let the reading guide me just as sailors once were guided by the constellations.

Book beneath which I would pass! Book by which I would know my passage! I read, this morning, as workmen hammered next door. I read; the day was mild. I read a few pages; I passed from page 80 to page 90. And that is where I am now, page 90. The book is open on the mattress on the floor of my bedroom (the bed is still dismantled from when the floor was sanded and varnished; so too the wardrobe). I read, but was I borne by reading? Had I not let too much time elapse from when I last read this book? Yes, I was a little lost; I was disoriented, for what, after all, was happening? Who were these characters? And the narrator, who was he?

I read, and annotated in pencil passages to which I thought I might return. I read, and put little marks in the margins to pages to which I thought it necessary to return. By these marks I will have known my passage through the book, I thought. Yes, I will have known I passed once through this book, and by way of this book. But by what mark would I know how this book steered me through the world? I'd waited for this book by this author for I knew his work would steer me through the world. I would be steered; the book, covers closed, would nevertheless be the constellations by which I navigated; my wandering would find orientation; where I drifted, the book was firm and clear above me. Yes, the book would watch over me. The book was the night, above me.

But it was not a stifling intimacy I sought; the book, I thought, should give me freedom. I would be oriented, yes, but the path I made was a wandering. There would be guidance, but only that which would allow my wandering to be propitious. I would pass through the parks of London; I would cycle through the roads of London, but still there was the book as there was the sky, distant from me, but present. Still the sky and the hard, clear stars, just as we saw them on Saturday night, when we left London for the country.

The stars! I steered by them even as I wandered. Chance was propitious; what happened was not blind, but fateful. The random was itself fateful; by chance I let myself be led towards my future. The book watched. This morning, returning to it, I thought: but is this the book I was reading? Is this the book for which I waited? Or is it a proxy, a substitute for another book and another reading? I thought: there are those for whom Heraclitus or John, Thucydides or Dante wrote the book that surrounded them. And who was I, who wanted such a book, who wanted to be surrounded?

In the Meantime

This book, an attempt, perhaps, at an epic, was not the book I sought - how could it be? For the age of trust has passed and the age of suspicion is here. Yes, trust has passed, and this is a suspicious age, and age without belief. How I distrust permanency and enrootedness! How I dislike the bookshelf and the CD shelf! I took the CDs from their cases and put them in big folders. I moved the books, the tools of my trade, to the office, and dispersed the others. Now the flat is bare. The bed and the wardrobe are still dismantled, but this is appropriate. All must be transitory.

And the stars, what are they? The firm, clear stars, which I can barely see for the orange street lights, what are they, in their permanence? I am reading my book in the mild day. Yesterday, rain, and today, mildness. Sunlight rests on the walls of the houses opposite. Above the little yard, the blue sky. And above that? Darkness and the stars which were once icons of order. I read. The book book speaks of voyages and movement. This is appropriate. The book speaks of relationships made and broken; this, too, is appropriate. Movement is all. Migrancy is all. And I know that this epic is the opposite of an epic, that what it gathers it does so only in order to disperse.

Then what do I seek from it, the book in the flat, the book that is now open on the mattress? To be watched? But only as I passed from one place to another. To be steered? But only as I wandered. Sometimes philosophers dream of the ones to come, those who will live with the new god or with the new earth. That will be life: to come, to come, nor here, not today, but at another time. And today? And today, in the meantime? A mild day; I read ten pages of the book cross-legged on the mattress on the floor of my bedroom. Curtains closed, and I read a few of the big, close-lined pages. Of what do I read? Of the meantime, of the stretch of time before the gods return and before the return of the earth. Meantime, between times, after the gods and before them.

Second Innocence

Why do I read you, book? Because you, like me, are stranded. How many days did I spend unemployed? A million. And how is it that I am still borne by that same unemployment? It is as though I've waited for something, but for what? The day is coming, but for what? As I read, I know this mild day is the way the coming day hides itself. Reading, I know of the day behind the day, of the coming around which all days are turning. Non-event, incompletion, these words, like the word unemployment, allow me to speak only by way of privation. How to speak without the 'non-', the 'in-' and the 'un-'? How to affirm what will not let itself be affirmed?

Read, and by this book affirm what has happened. Read this book, in which nothing happens, and affirm the non-happening of your life. Who is going to live? Who are the ones to come, that will live for us? But perhaps the meantime is all time, perhaps every day will be today, mild day that turns in the greater day, mild day that wears itself away to reveal the night without consolation. Perhaps it is that the stars have fallen, and there is only darkness. Perhaps it is that the array of stars are scattered without meaning, and offer no guidance. But isn't this 'no guidance' already enough?

The three metamorphoses: there is the one who works and who passes in the desert to work. There is the one who falls outside of work, and says 'no' to work. And then there is the child who knows nothing, and knows nothing of work. Second innocence: the reading-child I would like to be. Second innocence: the child who reads beneath the sky and stars.

The 11th Page

Given Time

I've read it, but when? I've read it before, but when did I read it? I can't remember, but it is as though I've always read it and always spoken as it speaks. Essential book, which gave me my own past! Essential reading which gave me my past!

I read. The reading bears me. I read, and it is as though everything I live is borne by that reading. The book is open in my office. My life is lived against that book, its backdrop. The book, a heavy hardback, is open in my office, and what I live it gives me again. The power of living is mine, but that power now reveals itself against the backdrop of non-power, of what I cannot do, but what the book gives me. Now, with the book, I see the world anew.

Now, because of the book, my eyes rest on the world in a new way. What do I see? What do I hear? Or is it that the book sees and hears for me? Is it that the book gives me what I cannot give myself: a second sight, a second hearing, a second way to know the world.

Book, I prop you up beside my monitor. Prodigal book that cradles my life! Prodigious book that opens my life as I open your spine! By your pages will I know what I've lived. By your sentences will I have known what I am. You, book, give me the future. You give me the future in which I can know what I've lived.

After the Book, Before the Book

What was my life before I read this book? But there was no 'before'; it is as though this book ran back upstream to the source of my life, and what I lived was always lived within this book. What I lived was already enclosed by the book. Wise book who knows what I have known! Wisdom of a book that lived in advance of me, waiting for me! How did you know I was coming, book? How was it you waited for me at the moment of my conception?

After I read you, there was no before. After I read you, there was no before the book. You were there at the beginning, watching over me. You made the appointment I would keep by reading you. And as soon as I began to read, I knew. By reading I knew another knew me, benign deity!

It is there on my office desk, although I am at home. It is there, just begun and waiting for me, and I am here, at home. I did not bring it with me, because I know it is with me. I did not bring it back to read last night, because I knew it would be with me less time by my reading: knew that to read will have been to have spent less time with it than I could have spent. Knew that by spending time, I was given time, and that to be given time was to be given a future in which to read the book.

Rather than read greedily, finishing it in a single, breathless day, I will read slowly and slowly will the future come to me. Slowly will it come, the future and the dreams the future allows. Slowly, then, comes the open space for dreaming in which the book dreams beside me. I will rest my head on this book, and it will dream with me. I will sleep alongside its sleep and the dreams will come.

I will not name you, book, I will not give your title. And your author, book, I will not speak of your author. Just that it is a late book, a rarefied book, which speaks by way of its author's early work, which speaks as though that early work had gathered the single wave that bore it. Speaks as though by the pressure of the forward-movement of those early books. Reward for the reader who has traced the course of an oeuvre! Reward of the reader who waited for the late books by reading the early books, and now receives his reading again!

The 11th Page

500 page book, you wait for me at the office. Hardbacked, 500 page book, freshly arrived from America, I have propped you by my monitor. I am 11 pages in. 11 pages, and the book opens its great doors. 11 pages, and already the book is opening great doors to me. Let me pause for a while at the threshold. I want to pause, knowing that the books which follow this one have not yet been translated. Will pause and look around me, at the world behind me and the darkness of the book. The great doors have opened, doors of a new earth and sky, doors of a whole world, which will soon shut and enclose me.

Soon, the 12th page, and then the 13th. And when will I reach the 250th? I know when I read it that it will have been I had read it long before. Know when I reach page 500, I will have known that page since my most distant childhood. You waited for me book, you were patient. You waited for me book, first, latent in the author who wrote the book, and then in a language I do not know how to read. You waited for me, in the translator who turned the book into English, and then in the foreign country from which you would reach me.

And then, one morning, you were in the package in my mail; there you were, imposingly thick, freshly arrived from overseas, in my office. You waited for me; you were there in my office, still waiting for me. As I read page 11, I knew the book was waiting for me, just ahead of me, as it will have always been waiting. Knew that by page 250, it will be waiting yet father ahead, and when one unimaginable day, I finish the book, it will be waiting further ahead than ever, waiting, now, to fill my dreams, to dream with me. To dream and give me the future by its dreaming, and then to give me my past, too - that life I will have lived in anticipation of the book.

The Supermarket Mirror

1.

The freedom to tell is given, not taken. The same with the freedom to read.

Yesterday, Steve of This Space reflected on a claim by Jason Cowley in The Observer, who argues 9/11 was an event that should change literature. Fiction is no longer to be irrelevant; its aim must now be to offer a convincing representation of a changed world. As Steve objects, this is to assume the events of 9/11 are more significant than others when it comes to writing, to telling. According to what criteria can Cowley make his claim? One which foregoes the event to which literature is bound - which is to say each event, any event as it allowed to bear the pressure of the outside. But what does this mean?

2.

Doubtless we all have events which haunt our imagination in the same way 9/11s, to which we return and cannot help but return. Better to say those events have us and that we are as though magnetised by what happened once and seems to press forward to give itself again. As though they occurred not once, but several times over. Or at least, that when they occurred they were not felt to occur, and it was necessary, later, to feel one's way back to them - to follow the winding course of associations to their inception.

But behind these events, there is another kind of freedom, that is no longer the correlate of that which would allow us to pick up a novel in idle interest. A freedom, a potency, which reveals itself only in the telling that belongs to literature (and in different ways, to film, to music, to art). I can only unfold this by telling of my encounter with telling in turn.

3.

Telling. This is how Across accounts for its existence. At its heart, the narrator says, is the vision he has of himself in the mirrored ceiling of a supermarket. Who does he see? Not the one his son resembles, he writes, but rather the one who resembles his son. But what does that mean? 

The narrator speaks of a kind of liberation - he has been given leave from the school where he works as a teacher to complete an academic article - but this does not account for the significance of the event in question. If the movement of narration is granted by the mysterious density of this event, it is not because it is a mystery to be solved. Indeed, the event is said to happen only towards the end of this volume and it comes unexpectedly, casually, not as an awaited climax. Is it, then, that the telling allowed the event to come forward? Did the event make itself known only because of that telling?

4.

Such events, measured against Cowley's post 9/11 literature, disappoint because of their banality. What are they, after all, compared to the great events of our time? Literature's voice is too quiet. But in that quietness something else occurs.

In an earlier post in the aftermath of the London bombings, Steve reflects on a novel called Incendiary about a terrorist attack on London written before the bombings of the 7th July. The major marketing campaign to promote was already distasteful, he says, appealing to a simple Schadenfreude on behalf of the credulous and sensation-seeking public who would believe themselves to be engaged in reading with contemporary life.

After the bombings, the marketing campaign for Incendiary was pulled, but the bombings on the underground, Steve notes, provided it with another kind of puff.

5.

A fortnight ago, I spent time in London just after the bombings. I had little to do; I was on holiday; I brought a few books with me, and one of them was Handke's Across. In the tabloids there was the predictable celebration of British solidarity and the spirit of the Blitz. The Sun crowed when what they thought was one of the terrorists was shot. 1 down, 3 to go. But the wrong man was shot, and this was predictable, too.

Against these events, in tension with them, was the quietness of the novel which I read without knowing why. The story unfolded, and I found the level at which I could approach it. That is how I came to the event at the heart of its telling. This was not a revelation. It happened quietly - as, it would seem, one among other events in the book. I forgot the scene and the story continued. Then I turned away and closed the book.

But it returned to me, that event. I remembered it, or rather, it remembered itself within me. It turned to me and I turned back - not to the passage in question, but to the beginning of Across. The book asked to be reread not because I possessed its secret but because I sensed the event as it came to me had changed what I had read. The book had altered; I needed to read it again in order to experience what it meant that for its narrator to claim the encounter with the supermarket mirror was its centre. And hadn't I, too, changed? Hadn't I crossed and thereby remade a threshold, meaning stepping back was impossible and there was only stepping forward?

In a sense, the event in the supermarket became equivalent to the others the narrator recounts - that each of the events this novel tells exists at the same level, substitutable for it, and that Across is only an account of how any such an event might be a threshold. But I know this is not right and I will have to read it again, for a third time. There are minute movements to which I will have to attend; I have underlined passages to which I will need to return. Yes, yes, but that experience of each event existing on the same plane, dispersing the work, giving it multiple focii is everything and I will have to return to this, too.

On my second reading, I reread Across not in order to experience the reassurance of knowing what was to come. I knew that no event would solve the mystery of what was told. Each detail brought forward that unsolvability and made it tangible in the descriptions of the natural world and the streets of Salzburg. The narrator, I thought, tells of what cannot be told and he does so as he experiences its opacity and his own opacity.

Who is he? The one who resembles his son. Not the father, now, but his son's son. Who is he? Cast adrift from his job, murderer and  outcast, he is one in whom the opacity of the world is concentrated. Opaque to himself, he discovers the opacity of the world. Opaque, he begins to write and writing brings up against what resists the measure of the capacities with which he once identified. Freed from his job, he is free to move. But also to experience the freedom of things as they press towards him. That potency born of the resistance of the world, its opacity. And it is the experience of this opacity that gives itself to be told and as the freedom to tell.

6.

There is much more to be written about Across. Here, I only want to say that the freedom to tell is given, not taken. The same with the freedom to read. I might think I exert freedom in picking up Incendiary, but in fact I have relinquished it. Only when freedom is engaged by the outside, by forces untrapped by my power, does reading happen.