Spurious

Ben Eastham reviews Dogma in The Spectator.

Michael Schapira reviews Dogma at Full Stop.

Interviewed on Vile Jelly radio. 

TChris reviews Dogma at Amazon.com.

Sam Jordison writes up my reading at The Wapping Project for The Guardian (not online; 25th Feb):

“I confess here tonight, before the company, there must be something very wrong with me. I want to parade my inadequacies before an audience. There’s something very wrong with me.”

So said Lars Iyer to the crowd shivering before him in the beautiful - but very cold - gallery space in East London’s Wapping Project, where he was launching his (excellent) new novel Dogma. He went on:

“What kind of person even confesses like this? A masochist! And not even the interesting kind who likes being whipped. A particularly boring kind of masochist, with feeble, pathetic little auto-critiques.”

Such self-recrimination will be familiar to readers of Lars Iyer’s novels. In them the narrator (also called Lars, and just like the author, an academic phliosopher based at Newcastle University) is forever musing over his own short comings. And when he isn’t doing so, his friend, named W., does it for him, comparing him, among other things to a “sad ape locked up with his faeces”, and “a harbinger”, a sign of “the End”.

There has been much speculation about whether this acerbic character is based on a flesh and blood person and now Iyer provided a definitive answer. W. is indeed real. In fact, he even wanted to come and witness the launch of Dogma,  but was too busy.

Yet even if W. couldn’t make an appearance, he remains a constant influence in Iyer’s life. Only this week, the author told us, W. tried to carry out an “intervention” and force him to apply himself to his academic work more rigorously. “He wanted me to mend my ways,” he explained. “He said, ‘you are a disgrace to philosophy. The way you parade yourself on facebook is disgusting.’”

It’s to be hoped that W. doesn’t also read Iyer’s twitter stream, for there, the author admitted: “I’ve put up five tweets today advertising this event. My God. It’s come to this. I have no soul. I’m my own marketeer.” He blamed Thatcher and neo-liberalism for this urge to hawk his own ego, but most of all, he blamed himself: “I disgust myself and the problem is that I enjoy disgusting myself.”

Levi Stahl of I've Been Writing Lately has a few things to say about Dogma.

Out now: Sinead Murphy's The Art Kettle. Want a review copy? Email me.

2.3.1971, Grand Hotel Imperial, Dubrovnik

Dear Honorable Dr Spiel,

I promised you a contribution for your Ver Sacrum – You wrote, “something about Ludwig Wittgenstein,” and I’ve been considering the topic for a couple of weeks, since the day, in fact, I returned from Brussels – now I’m on the road again, Ragusa, Belgrade, Rome, etc., and I’ve concluded that to write something about Wittgenstein’s philosophy and above all his poetry, since for me the question concerns Wittgenstein’s utterly poetic mindset (MIND), his philosophical MIND, not Wittgenstein as a philosopher, is too difficult. I might as well have been asked to write something (sentences!) about myself, which is not possible. One cannot describe a state of culture and mind-history. The question is not: shall I write about Wittgenstein. The question is: am I Wittgenstein for even one moment without destroying him (W.) or myself (B.). I cannot answer this question and therefore cannot write about Wittgenstein. – In Austria, philosophy and poetry (mathematical-musical) are entombed in mausoleums, we perceive history vertically. On one hand it is terrifying, on the other, progressive – her fate: philosophy and art do not exist in the consciousness of her people, as they exist elsewhere, but in the consciousness of her philosophy and art(culture) etc.; Austria already knows what her philosophers and poets have yet to discover.

As for Wittgenstein: [er ist die Reinheit Stifters, Klarheit Kants in einem und seit (und mit ihm) Stifter der Größte. – Note: translation of this sentence temporarily abandoned] What we, the Germans, lacked in NOVALIS we now have in Wittgenstein – and a final word: W. is a question that cannot be answered – he is working on a level that excludes answers (and an answer).

Our contemporary culture, in all its unbearable manifestations, is such that its questions would be solved easily, where answers were always at hand – Wittgenstein alone is different.

And the world is forever to remain too stupid to grasp its own stupidity, a world utterly and forever without ideas – where ideas stand for themselves as ideas. This is fatal for the MAJORITY, but the majority is not worthy of consideration. So I do not write about Wittgenstein because I cannot, but because I cannot answer him, which is self-explanatory.

Best regards and all best wishes,

Yours, Thomas Bernhard

translated by Greg Baxter

Lars is a first-person narrator who almost never gets to speak for himself — he is primarily occupied with reporting W.’s alternating self-loathing and Lars-loathing, in a strange mix of free indirect discourse and direct quotation. The result is a strangely co-narrated novel, one that seems to grow directly out of the dysfunctional dynamic of the friendship, which — perhaps like the damp — takes on a life of its own beyond the control of either partner. Unexpectedly, however, the result of this claustrophobic framing is that the despair is always leavened by a certain hope or even sincerity.

Adam Kosko very interestingly reviews Dogma at An Und Fur Sich.