Richard's post on literary experiences remined me at once of Montano, which I've kept here on my desk. He's suffering from literary sickness, Vila-Matas's protagonist-narrator; he sees literature everywhere, and cannot separate himself from it.
In a moment of crisis, precisely as it pertains to his literary malady he boards a train from one city to the next. What a very literary thing to do, he says. You can't escape a crisis of the literary via a literary device! It's entirely too literary, as all of Montano's experience is literary infested with literary tropes and traits, which he cannot help but see everywhere.
He's read too many books! His life is a book! He, a literary critic, cannot step outside of literature, and even makes literature (the book Montano) as he tries to do so.Vila-Matas's narrator, here, is very different from Sebald's - say of Vertigo, who is forever boarding trains and rushing about and encountering ghosts of literary writers (Kafka, Nabokov).
He lives in literature, he's entirely literary, but has no sense of it; it's not yet become a sickness, which is why, ultimately, Sebald belongs as a writer to a different age. He is the last writer of an age that is not self-conscious about writing literature, doing literature, being literary, a kind of self-consciousness that, I will say very pompously, cannot be foreign to 'us'.
For what is literature in an age of mass culture? One among others of our entertainments, and not a particularly important one at that. To read, really read, demands a great choice, a great determination. For who reads now, really? Who grew up in a house of books? Who was taught by great readers, and taught to read by great readers? And for whom, really, can literaure be of any great importance?
The wheel has turned; a whole age has fallen into the past. And with it, Sebald. No coincidence that in his last, very bad book, the bloated Austerlitz, its literariness has become pure device, pure mannerism. The narrator's endless walks, his endless communion with ghosts ... all this becomes unbelievable and intolerable.
Better Vila-Matas any day. Better Bolano, whose poets and poetry-lovers are as real as we are, and inhabit this age, our age, dope-dealing and sleeping around and wandering from place to place without a clue.
For there are no models now, and not literary ones. Or only the hologram-flickering of the heroes of capitalism, phantasms projected into the apocalyptic night into which we are falling. Hero-financiers, heroine-entrepreneurs unreal and depthless. And meanwhile, the apocalypse, the great ecological catastrophe, the devastation of the earth, the putting out of the sky. We're going to die a new kind of death. We're going to boil, we going to burn, the sky will go red and the land will burn red and the sea will slop red, and the atmosphere will burn away into space ...
What's literature to this? What's the literary experience to this? Something comical. Laughable. Something without consequence, even if we are caught up in it, even if it caught us when we were young, when it meant something, when it could mean something, when our vision was narrow and simple and raw. Comical, but there's also a sadness as literature fails us and the night of the real world opens across our windshields. A sadness, and even a tragedy, as our youths, our hopes burn up in the night without glory.
This is why Vila-Matas's novels (the two translated into English) and Bolano's, are a post Literature Literature. A laughing and sad and too-wise Literature in which Literature becomes a sickness and a delusion (Montano). And a daft, laughable hope (The Savage Detectives) that is our eternally doomed youth.